Podcasts about granada tv

ESN: Eloquently Saying Nothing

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2023 27:55

Matthew Bannister on: Julian Haviland who was political editor at ITN and then the Times, covering key events at Westminster in the 1970s and 80s. Johaar Mosaval, the South African dancer who overcame racial prejudice to fulfil his dream of becoming a ballet star. Tricia Tyler, who edited the Nursing Times. Matyelok Gibbs, the actor and director who secured the future of London's famous Unicorn Children's Theatre. Interviewee: Philip Webster Interviewee: Sharon Paulson Interviewee: Janet Snell Interviewee: Ursula Jones Producer: Gareth Nelson-Davies Archive used: Julian Haviland interview with Prime Minister Ted Heath, Associated Press, 22/01/1974; Julian Haviland interview with Margaret Thatcher, ITN Archive YouTube Channel, 04/10/1976, uploaded to YouTube 17/08/2023; Julian Haviland interview with Matt Chorley, Red Box podcast, The Political Editors: Julian Haviland, The Times, 23/08/2023; Julian Haviland Interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, ITN archive, 23/07/1980; Johaar Mosaval interview, University of Cape Town South Africa, Uploaded on YouTube 17/04/2020; Johaar Mosaval interview, Al Jazeera English, Uploaded on YouTube 12/03/2023; Jewel in The Crown, promo, Granada TV, 1984; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Promo, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010;

ESN #411 : The Granada TV Episode (Feat. Rapzcallian)

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2023 139:57

This week we welcome guest, the artist formerly known as Rapzcaliion and discuss: • Mixed Black being called non-Blacks • Travis Rudolph found not guilty of murder • Boris Johnson stepping down as an MP • Mother of 4 killed after knocking on neighbours door to receive her child's iPad • The difference in retiring back home between Africans & Caribbeans • The difference between how old Africans or old Caribbeans look after themselves • Investing in Tesla • ULEZ tax zone expansion • African corruption • Children not being able to housekeep anymore • Reminiscing on old TV including The Real McCoy & Goodness Gracious Me • ESN Africa News Segment: - Uganda's Gay Laws - Ghana approving new malaria vaccine - Ethiopia asking for 19th century Ethiopian princes remains back - Zimbabwe to give billions of dollars of repetitions to White farmers chased off their land • Universal Basic Income and if it's needed • AITA for dating my Dad's friend's Ex Wife? • #StavrosSays : Spider-Man : Across The Spider-Verse [https://youtu.be/shW9i6k8cB0] Connect with us at & send your questions & comments to: #ESNpod so we can find your comments www.esnpodcast.com www.facebook.com/ESNpodcasts www.twitter.com/ESNpodcast www.instagram.com/ESNpodcast @esnpodcast on all other social media esnpodcast@gmail.com It's important to subscribe, rate and review us on your apple products. You can do that here... www.bit.ly/esnitunes

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Mark Hollingsworth - Agents of Influence - How the KGB Subverted Western Democracies

Silicon Curtain

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2023 59:26

There's no such thing as a former KGB man, writes Mark Hollingsworth. Is the FSB an intelligence agency gone out of control, accountable to no one but itself and intent on subverting Western political institutions? The scale of Russian disinformation warfare and Active Measures is huge even when compared to their activities at the height of the Cold War. In 1985, 1,300 KGB officers were stationed in the USA. The FBI only had 350 counter-intelligence officers. Since the early days of the Cold War, the KGB seduced parliamentarians and diplomats, infiltrated the highest echelons of the Civil Service, and planted fake news in papers across the world. More disturbingly, it never stopped. ~~~~~ Mark Hollingsworth is an investigative journalist and author of 10 books, notably ‘Londongrad – From Russia with Cash, the Inside Story of the Oligarchs' – published in 2010. He has also written biographies of Mark Thatcher and Tim Bell and acclaimed studies on MI5 and the Saudi Royal Family. He started his career working for Granada TV's award-winning ‘World in Action' programme and now contributes regularly to ‘The Times', ‘Mail on Sunday', ‘The Guardian' and ‘The Sunday Times'. His most recent articles about Russia are published in the Spectator. He is currently writing a history of the KGB. ~~~~~ BOOKS: Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism (2004) by Mark Hollingsworth, Nick Fielding Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs (2009) by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley Saudi Babylon: Torture, Corruption and Cover-Up Inside the House of Saud (2012) by Mark Hollingsworth, Sandy Mitchell ~~~~~

David Miscavige – scientologi, maktspel och Hollywood

P3 ID

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2023 67:35

Han är scientologiledaren som beskrivs som paranoid, lynnig och maktgalen. På senare år har tidigare medlemmar stämt honom och organisationen, men Miscavige går inte att nå. I snart fyra decennier har David Miscavige varit i praktiken den högste ledaren för Scientologikyrkan. Avhoppare beskriver organisationen som en sekt och Miscavige som en hårdför ledare som styr med järnhand.Han har blivit allt mindre synlig i det offentliga och när det amerikanska rättsväsendet försökt delge honom stämningar om människohandel har han inte kunnat nås.Hans fru, Shelly Miscavige, har inte heller synts till i offentligheten på länge och tidigare medlemmar anklagar Miscavige för att ligga bakom hennes försvinnande.Mike Rinder, som skrivit "A billion years", var under många år en av Scientologikyrkans högst uppsatta och jobbade sida vid sida med Miscavige. Här berättar han om sina upplevelser av Miscavige hårda ledarstil och scientologins baksidor.Miscavige är också nära vän med Tom Cruise och Scientologikyrkan har flera medlemmar bland kändisar i Hollywood. Journalisten Magnus Sundholm, som bott i Los Angeles i över 30 år och har podden "Livet i La la land" förklarar de nära banden mellan rörelsen och Hollywood, och beskriver vänskapen med Cruise.Avhopparen Dan Koon har också arbetat nära David Miscavige och skrivit boken "Ruthless" tillsammans med Davids pappa Ron Miscavige. Avsnittet gjordes av Studio Olga våren 2023Programledare: Carl-Johan UlvenäsAvsnittsmakare och reporter: Sally HenrikssonProducent: Carl-Johan UlvenäsLjudmix: Fredrik NilssonLjudklippen i avsnittet är hämtade från ABC, CNN, 7news, Youtube, Granada TV, och dokumentären "Going Clear" från HBO. Böckerna "Ruthless" (Dan Koon och Ron Miscavige) och "A billion years" (Mike Rinder) har varit till hjälp i arbetet med detta avsnitt.

hollywood los angeles hbo abc cnn id tom cruise hans cruise livet davids avsnittet ruthless p3 going clear david miscavige shelly miscavige mike rinder miscavige granada tv ron miscavige scientologi scientologikyrkan

Londongrad - Vast Wealth was Stripped from Russia by the Oligarchs, and Flaunted in London

Silicon Curtain

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 12, 2023 58:31

In the 2000s, London became home to the Russian super-rich. Vast wealth was stripped from Russia by the Oligarchs, and flaunted in London through grandiose properties, ferocious legal disputes, private jets, mega-yachts, and ubiquitous bodyguards. Russian oligarchs made colossal fortunes after the collapse of communism, and London was the destination of choice to spend and protect their wealth. But the shocking killing of ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko in London with a radio-active element Polonium, and of Stephen Curtis, the lawyer to many of Britain's richest Russians, sent shockwaves through the Russian community in London. Today I'm speaking with Mark Hollingsworth about how Russia's wealth was harvested and brought to London, and how the UK's institutions and legal infrastructure facilitated the laundering of these vast fortunes, many of dubious provenance. Mark Hollingsworth is an investigative journalist and author of 10 books, notably ‘Londongrad – From Russia with Cash, the Inside Story of the Oligarchs' – published in 2010. He has also written biographies of Mark Thatcher and Tim Bell and acclaimed studies on MI5 and the Saudi Royal Family. He started his career working for Granada TV's award-winning ‘World in Action' programme and now contributes regularly to ‘The Times', ‘Mail on Sunday', ‘The Guardian' and ‘The Sunday Times'. His most recent articles about Russia are published in the Spectator. He is currently writing a history of the KGB.

BA's 'Dirty Tricks'

The Retrospectors

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2023 12:13

British Airways paid out one of the largest libel settlements in UK history on 11th January, 1993, for engaging in disreputable business practices, including shredding documents, poaching passages, and circulating hostile and discreditable stories about their upstart rival Virgin Airlines. The so-called Dirty Tricks revealed that British Airways had created a secret unit within a secure office in Gatwick dedicated to destroying Richard Branson's new airline through a range of nefarious strategies. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly discuss the sneaky activities that British Airways' Helpline team were tasked with carrying out; explain how the murky story ended up in court; and reveal Richard Branson's fool-proof single piece of advice for anyone who wants to become a millionaire… Further Reading: • ‘British Air to pay for “Dirty Tricks”' (The Chicago Tribune, 1993): https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-01-12-9303161067-story.html • ‘British Airways Virgin Atlantic Dirty Tricks (1993)' (Granada TV, 1993): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm54xVyqBLI&t=7s #90s #Business #UK Love the show? Join

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Back to the Crown Court - A Special Distinct Nostalgia Documentary remembering the legendary Granada TV series

Distinct Nostalgia

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 3, 2023 43:49

Back to the Crown Court is a special documentary remembering one of the iconic TV shows of the 70s and 80s. People across the generations loved this ground breaking and unique show which was broadcast thrice weekly on the ITV Network. Using a real jury, the drama was played out in real time with a plethora of big name actors together with many cutting their teeth in telly for the first time. One of the first daytime TV shows, it was produced at Granada Television in Manchester and in this programme presented by Ashley Byrne we hear contributions from actors Jon Iles (of The Bill fame), Charlie Lawson and Sean Wilson (later Jim McDonald and Martin Platt in Coronation Street) the legendary 70s childrens tv star and actor Derek Griffiths, veteran small part actor Jim Whelan, Crown Court juror Steve Sowerbutts and composer Simon Park.* Special thanks to Simon Park for the use of both Distant Hills (the Crown Court theme) and Eye Level (the theme to Van Der Valk).Back to the Crown Court is a MIM Production for Distinct Nostalgia.NOTE: The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. The Distinct Nostalgia ident voices are Andy Hoyle and Jonathan Kydd.Support the show

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Castle Howard through the lens. What it's like to film a TV production at a visitor attraction.

Skip the Queue

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2022 51:23

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcastCompetition ends January 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://www.castlehoward.co.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbi-ollive-411509171/https://www.channel4.com/programmes/castle-howard-through-the-seasonsCastle Howard's love story with China - as told by Abbigail Ollive Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in, or working with, visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson.In today's episode, I speak with my very first returning guest, Abbigail Ollive, Head of Marketing, Sales, and Programming at Castle Howard, the stately home and visitor attraction in North Yorkshire. Abbi takes us on a journey through the seasons at Castle Howard as she explains just what it's like to film a TV production at a visitor attraction as she shares her advice for other attractions that are thinking about doing the same.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the user channels by searching Skip the Queue.I am very excited to have Abbigail Ollive back on the podcast today.Abbigail Ollive: To be the first returner. It mustn't have put you off too much first time round.Kelly Molson: Well, I think it's more like I didn't put you off, because you were episode six of season one, which was all the way back in 2019. And I didn't ask people icebreaker questions then, so you might regret this after this. Who knows? First one, what is the strangest or worst gift that you've ever received?Abbigail Ollive: Last Christmas, my partner basically took Christmas as an opportunity to solve anything I'd been moaning about. So my Christmas presents were things like those little hand warmers, because I'd obviously been complaining that my hands were cold. And I'd been complaining about my drive to work here at Castle Howard in rural North Yorkshire sometimes being a little bit hairy. So my Christmas present was winter tires and a four by four driving experience to try, which at the time I was like, I really would've loved a baking experience or a pizza making course or something, and I was pretty grumpy about going.But it actually turned out to be a really excellent gift and I had a fab time. I feel like I'm qualified now to drive people through a field or through a stream if they need, and I know how to use my ridiculous rural vehicle. So I was a bit grumpy about it, because I was like, it's very kind but it feels like you really wanted to come and do this.Kelly Molson: It's quite thoughtful though, isn't it? That's quite a well thought out gift.Abbigail Ollive: I guess so.Kelly Molson: He's been listening. He's just interpreted it in a slightly more original way than you were expecting.Abbigail Ollive: See, that sounds very ungrateful, doesn't it? And I did have a fab time, but I have dropped some hints this year about... I guess I've decided to complain about different stuff. In case that gets resolved in a different way.Kelly Molson: I'm running out of mascara.Abbigail Ollive: My shoulders are really tense. I think a massage might really help me this year.Kelly Molson: Like it. Yeah, I'm running out of mascara, if anyone's listening. I need some of that on my shopping list. Spa day would be excellent. My shoulders feel tense too. I like this subtle hint dropping.If you could only listen to one album for the rest of your life, what would it be?Abbigail Ollive: Whenever people ask me like, what's your taste in music? It's just very eclectic. And at the minute I am listening on repeat to Self Esteem, who I think is just amazing. I don't know if you are at all familiar with her. She's called Rebecca, she's from Rotherham, where my dad is from. I don't think many pop stars have come out of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. But give her album a listen.We saw her at a festival when she was quite up and coming, and she's just done Jools Holland and is now on a bigger tour next year. We booked again to see her. And it's just hugely empowering. I think for younger women, teenagers kind of finding their way through what can be quite a complex time, I just think her lyrics and her whole approach to empowerment is really, really inspiring.I don't know whether that'd be the one I'd listened to forever, but it is on repeat in my car on my journey to work constantly at the moment. And that's my top tip I think. Give her a listen. She's very cool.Kelly Molson: Did you combine that album with the off-road driving as well at the weekend to give you a little bit of an extra boost?Abbigail Ollive: No, I think maybe empowerment but, yes. Women driving through fields in pickups.Kelly Molson: Awesome. Good response. Okay, final one. If you could bring back any fashion trend, what would it be?Abbigail Ollive: I think I was meant to be in the 1950s. I think that kind of grease styling is... I'd love to just look like that every day, really, if I could get away with it and if I had time to properly do my hair in rollers and all of that jazz. I think that's the period I'd probably go back to and I think be quite into, that sort of retro 50s. Really bright. I like the bright, vibrant... I'd happily drive an American pink Cadillac through the country roads of North Yorkshire.Kelly Molson: I remember this about you. You're all about colour. I do remember this about you when we met in person. You love a colour and you love a patterned dress, an excellently patterned dress.Abbigail Ollive: Yeah, I do. And I wish I could suit a hat better. Some people are like... My brother's always in a very cool hat, but I just don't suit it. I think it's the fringe. The fringe, glasses, hat combo is one I can't pull off.Kelly Molson: Fringe with a wooly hat is really difficult, isn't it? Because it just pushes it down into your eyes. I'd like to be a hat person as well. I feel like people that wear hats, they just exude confidence. Do you know what I mean? Just have that... They walk with confidence. They walk high with a hat on. I'd quite like that too.That's good choices. All right, what about your unpopular opinion, Abbi, because we've never had one of these from you.Abbigail Ollive: No, we haven't. And I'm sure I've got plenty I could share, I mean, my initial instinct with this was, I would never be upset if I didn't ever hear an Oasis song again, but that's not the one I'm going to go with. Sorry.It's a podcast related one. I thought I'd be topical. I really hate comedians on podcasts. I just can't be doing with all the trying to be funny and all the chat in between what it is they're actually meant to be talking about. I love the foodie podcast, but I just want them to cut to the chase and I want to hear somebody talk about something they're knowledgeable about. Maybe I just don't really comedians in general, but on a podcast that's my unpopular opinion.Kelly Molson: Do you think it's because they're trying a bit too hard because that's their job and they're trying to... If a supplier comes on and they're trying to plug their thing, they're trying to plug their I'm funny, really?Abbigail Ollive: I think it's just like... I was going to try and not name names, but I'm quite a foodie and I like a foodie podcast and I think maybe I've realized that actually I want to hear about the food and not all the chat that surrounds it. So yeah, comedians on podcasts.Kelly Molson: All right, good one. Glad I'm not funny or I'd be right [inaudible 00:06:53].Abbigail Ollive: Well, I'm not either, so we'll have no comedy. We'll just get the questions.Kelly Molson: That's it. We're done now. We're done with anything humorous for the rest of the episode. Excellent. Thanks for setting the tone.Abbi, just for our listeners that don't know of you, I'm sure there's not many, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do.Abbigail Ollive: I at the moment am very fortunate to be kind of running the visitor attraction side of things at Castle Howard. So anybody who hasn't heard of Castle Howard, Castle Howard is a stately home in North Yorkshire. It was designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1699, so it's a historic house open as a visitor attraction, but also sits within a 9,000 acre estate. It's still home to the Howard family, they are directly my line managers, and Castle Howard's opened 364 days a year as an attraction.But I think it's also a really interesting place. I arrived here knowing that I was coming to be involved in a visitor attraction, but I think maybe it was more of a pleasant surprise that we're actually foresters and farmers and we have a holiday park and holiday cottages and a farm shop and a garden centre and all the catering and retail outlets as well.I think in total it's nine different businesses, and my role kind of heads up marketing and events and programming and sales and that kind of visitor experience side of things. I'm not actually being asked to be responsible for the farming and forestry, you'll be relieved to hear, but it's also just unlocks so many stories that as a marketer at heart, I guess, is really exciting on a daily basis.We're not a charity, so all the income generated by footfall and visitors paying for an admission ticket goes directly into the restoration and heritage of the building and the listed landscape.I've been here for just over five years, so I'm just in the middle of Christmas number six. It's a joyous time to be at a place like Castle Howard, when it's all decked out for Christmas and we're welcoming literally thousands of visitors a day over this festive season.Big day today. It's a kind of rainy, North Yorkshire, midweek day, but we've got 11 coaches here and they're all having a fabulous time. And I've just had a message saying, can someone come and help with the Queues in the bauble emporium? So that's the kind of thing that can occur on an hourly basis.But yeah, I'm Yorkshire, so I haven't actually moved very far. Not deliberately, but just because stuff's come up here, and it's a gorgeous place in the world to be. I've got a little boy, so living in the countryside and having quite an outdoorsy life really suits us. My background's in theatre, but theatre marketing and comms, so did 10 years in theater before moving across into visitor attractions, which is just a theatre of a different kind, I think.Kelly Molson: It is. It's a show, isn't it? You're creating a theatre for people that come and visit. And that leads us a little bit to what we're going to talk about today, really, a show of a slightly different kind.I think there's been a bit of a run of programs like this. I'm talking about programs like the Secret Life of the Zoo at Chester Zoo, Inside the Zoo, Edinburgh Zoo. There's been quite a lot of zoo related TV programs on recently that give you a bit of a snapshot of behind the scenes. I think One Zoo Three was the other one from Paradise Wildlife Park. But you have been involved in shooting TV programs for Channel 4, called Castle Howard: Through the Seasons. Tell us a little bit about what the TV series is, and then tell us what on earth made you decide to be part of a TV program.Abbigail Ollive: I suppose dialing back a little bit from the TV show we've just been making this year is... I guess Castle Howard's one of the original screen tourism destinations and has been in some pretty iconic period dramas. It's very well known as Brideshead Revisited, both the 1981 Granada TV show and then the later movie in 2008. And we had our Bridgerton moment, so series one, episode six, or episode sex, as most people know it in Bridgerton, was all films here at Castle Howard. And I could definitely tell you plenty of stories from that few weeks of my life that I'll never forget.But I think we're kind of used to being a location, and Castle Howard plays its own part in a period drama. It's almost a character in its own rights, and we've been in plenty of them. And we've also filmed the Arctic Monkeys music video here from their most recent album, and we've also played host to an American TV reality show, which was... I describe it as kind of Love Island with a Regency twist, which recently someone said should be the name of a cocktail, which I [inaudible 00:11:57]. That was an American reality TV show.But I think it's the first time then that we've actually considered seriously and gone ahead with us being the subject of what is being filmed, and I think that's the big difference really for us with an observational documentary or, ob doc, as it's known in the business.There were a few things really that made us decide to go ahead with that, and you've mentioned already a couple of those really reassuring series that happened, mostly zoo related, that made us feel like actually there's a real warmth and positivity to how they're not trying to stitch you up, they're trying to tell a really positive story about your people and your attraction.I think that's maybe changed over the last few years. So we'd seen Chatsworth go first really, they opened their doors and did a year in the life at Chatsworth, and that actually ended up being during the pandemic, so it was a very unusual year in the life of Chatsworth, in that a lot of the time it was during lockdown. But even through that challenging period of time, when we watched it as viewers, we could see that that team had really taken a lot of care to tell Chatsworth stories and to be really respectful and positive about the whole estate.I think that that was a huge reassurance for us. I think in the past I've had loads of filming inquiries over my time here and we've really avoided the sort of fly on the wall documentaries. I think there's been a general perception and nervousness that they want to stitch you up. And also, for me, the format only really works if you have the buy-in and the involvement of Nick and Vicky Howard, who are the custodians of this place, and have them authentically involved. And I think they had seen in years gone by maybe some not so positive examples and that had put them off the idea.I think we started talking to the ITN team who'd been working with Chatsworth during the pandemic, and it was a real slow burn. It was about building that relationship and having meetings with them, them getting to know me and the Howards, and talking really about what the stories were that we wanted to tell.They came to us originally as part of their Christmas series they were doing, so last year when we had Narnia as our Christmas theme, they made a four part series across four different houses and we were one of those, so it was a more intensive Christmas at Castle Howard experience first off, and that's been quite different to then them coming back and being here all year.But I think it's definitely, I'd say, we said no quite a lot before eventually we said maybe, and then over the course of probably a year of meetings and building trust and really bottoming out what we all want to get out of it, we eventually said yes. And I think in that time as well we'd seen things released like Secret Life at the Zoo.I think our other main concern or nervousness about saying yes was we were sort of waiting for a vintage year at Castle Howard. We knew that coming out of the pandemic, everything's been challenging and difficult and we felt like, maybe next year or in a couple years time we'll be doing a really big significant bit of restoration to a monument or we've got plans to reinstate some of our burnt out rooms after the fire that Castle Howard suffered during the war.I think we felt like there's going to be a big story to tell, and we better hold off for that moment in Castle Howard's history before we let the TV cameras in. And I think actually what changed that was the pandemic and thinking, well, actually, in any kind of normal or abnormal year we have amazing people, we have amazing stories to tell. Sometimes it's those smaller stories of truly getting under the skin of the life in a country estate like this that viewers will ultimately really enjoy. So we stopped holding off for that perfect moment and went for it.Kelly Molson: It's interesting though, because you're thinking about, I guess, once you agree to go ahead with something like this, you are thinking constantly about, how entertaining is this actually going to be? Is just our day to day stuff that goes on all the time, is that enough for people? Are they going to actually tune in and watch it? And how is that going to... I guess there's a thought all the time about how we're going to be portrayed and how will that come across. So if you hold out for this room needs renovation or looking after, that gives you a focus that will detract from just some of the normal stuff that would be happening.Abbigail Ollive: We actually started with ITN and Channel 4 in 2020, and we were trying to pull off a Christmas in the middle of COVID. When the tiering system and all that business came in, we couldn't go ahead, like many attractions and houses. So we started making a TV program about... I was billed on this... I was definitely shown as head of saving Christmas, and then we had to cancel it, so we canceled the whole thing and we took the difficult decision actually that it wasn't going to be the show we wanted it to be. We mutually agreed, really, to pull out of that, because we didn't want a show about trying to make a big Christmas happen and then the government saying, "You're in the wrong tier, you can't open," and a show of about how disappointing that was. So we took that decision.Actually, that was a gamble at the time because I thought maybe that would be that done, really, but they agreed to come back the following year and make Christmas in Narnia as a documentary. I think it's definitely had its ups and downs over quite a period of time. So, again, that build of trust and them getting to know us during the year that didn't happen. I think they saw enough potential to think, actually, we'll come back and go again. But all of that's really challenging when they and us have put budget and resource into a whole period of filming that we then pull the plug on.Kelly Molson: Yeah, of course. And by no fault of your own. Actually, there was nothing that you really could do about it. You made the right decision at the time.I guess I just want to step back a little bit, because you said that you... I can't remember if you said that you were approached by them or if you approached them to talk about it, and how do you work out what the focus of the TV show will be about?Abbigail Ollive: I'd been approached by quite a number of observational documentary companies, and I'd met with quite a few, and it was this exec producer who'd been working with Chatsworth, and we'd seen a bit of what they'd done at Chatsworth, that made us agree and further that conversation with this particular production company, which is ITN for Channel 4.We've been approached a lot, and continue to be, actually, and I think, like you said, at the beginning, there's a real rise, isn't there, in these sort of observational documentaries at places within the visitor attractions sector. So we didn't actively go out to try and do this, I suppose we were courted and approached and took a little bit of persuading.Kelly Molson: I guess everyone that's going to be part of this has to be really comfortable with being on camera, right, because they're going to be recording for a whole year at your venue, so you've got to get used to people being around, you've got to be able to run your events around while all this filming is happening as well. So it's not a quick decision to make at all by any means.Abbigail Ollive: No, there's a lot to think about, actually. And I think we made sure we'd properly thought about that and met and bashed a lot of that out internally before we started. I think the things that made us most nervous were around control and editorial control and how much of that you just have to relinquish and how much we would be allowed to input into the storytelling and storyboarding. I think there was that, but also the ability for us to resource it.Like you've said, it's no small thing to take on. We're quite a small team, we're still doing everything we need to do in a normal year, pulling off big events and big projects, and having a film crew with you three to four days a week every week of pretty much a year, is quite intense.I think what we tried to do to overcome that was before anybody had a camera put in front of them, we tried to do a really good amount of kickoff meetings with all stakeholders, with the producers. We were really, really clear with them about our ambitions and the key messages we wanted to communicate by having a year in the life at Castle Howard filmed. It was an opportunity for us to communicate that real conservation aim and the fact we have a conservation deficit, we're not a charity, it was a really good opportunity for us to communicate where visitors' admission fees go.It's really powerful to actually see somebody restoring a chimney or repainting windows, and understand what resource has to go into that. And that's across the board, across the whole estate. So I think sometimes that's hard to communicate, actually, with visitors, but having this mass market platform to do that.We were really, really clear about what we wanted to get out of it and what actually goes into running a rural estate and managing that in the 21st century coming out of the pandemic with all the wider world landscape going on as well around us. That was really important, actually, that we felt respected and like the TV crew and their producers understood what we wanted to get out of it. I think that's really helped throughout the whole year, that they can go, "This scene that we're filming now, that really relates and helps tell that story from your objectives." So yeah, that was certainly helpful.Kelly Molson: That's great, isn't it? That they're so aligned with your objectives that they're actually highlighting things that reference back to them as you're shooting. Because sometimes you might think that gets discussed at the top and then it gets parked and then we might not think about that again until it gets to editing stage and by that point there's so much content, how are they going to really get the message across that we want them to? And I guess that comes forward to one of the questions about that content and the editing process and how much of that were you involved in as you go through the filming.You've had those initial conversations about objectives, but were there any times where something was happening and they were shooting, and in your head you're watching this thing unfold in front of you going, "This cannot go out on telly, and they're really going to want this to go out on telly and that's not going to happen at all"?Abbigail Ollive: That has changed throughout the year. We've all learned a lot as the year has progressed. We started very structured and I planned out everything to within an inch of it's life. For last Christmas I kind of diarised everything the film crew were going to be attending, made sure we had pre-meetings with everybody involved, made sure departments were all on board and had key messages and understood what we were trying to get out of every scene. I pretty much storyboarded the whole episode, and I remember the producer saying to me, "We don't normally get quite this level of input from the team on the ground."I think I'm just a bit of a control freak, because I can't have people just wandering around with a camera, who knows what they'll discover. But actually I think what I quickly discovered is that that doesn't always make the best TV, and they're experts, they're really good at what they do, and I just needed to learn to trust that we were all actually aiming for the same outcome. They weren't trying to sneak around and find stuff that I didn't want to be filmed.Actually, as the year's gone on, I think by the time we got to the Christmas episode, which they only left last week and are busy editing that now to turn it around, they knew the Castle Howard team so well and our team knew the Channel 4 team so well and are so used to them being around, it just has needed a lot less input from me and my team. They really had a sense of workflows around who's responsible for what. They felt like an extension of our team as the year has gone on and we've really built that trust, so I had no issue then with them kind of going off and filming something happening without me being present, because I'd learned to really trust them. I can't really do this chat without mentioning Peacockgate.Kelly Molson: Please.Abbigail Ollive: I think that's an example really early on where it was a day where on my schedule we were having a historic paint specialist scraping off layers of the paint on Castle Howard's windows to try and discover what the original amber colour would be, because we're now in the process of repainting all of the external woodwork, which needed doing, and white paint didn't actually exist then and so was never the colour that Castle Howard would've been painted on the windows and woodwork.We had this amazing guy doing his historical paint scraping, which is what I had the Channel 4 crew focused on, because I thought that would make a very interesting restoration story. And then got the call from World War III that appeared to be kicking off in the car park because it was breeding season for our peacocks. We've got about 20 peacocks on the estate and, well, we think there was a male interloper to our peacock gang. I don't know where he came from, but this male peacock was very rowdy and very randy, and was seeing his reflection in cars, so in the visitor car park. Any kind of car, especially if it was a dark colour or blue and was clean. So luckily my car was always very safe, it's never clean. It was seeing its reflection and trying to attack what it thought was a rival peacock.I've got the person who looks after our security on high alert trying to basically chase a peacock out of the car park, and people very concerned that both staff cars and visitor cars were going to get damaged. So this was all kicking off and I was like, "Right, everybody keep the Channel 4 team focused on the windows. Do not let them come anywhere near what's occurring up here." Because I could see our head garden running around with what can only be described as a giant butterfly net, like something a Victorian explorer, trying to literally catch and net a peacock.Anyway, it escalated fairly quickly and the peacock got onto one of our staff cars and smashed in the back windscreen. So it became actually not that funny quite quickly, because then we were suddenly into a really difficult scenario. The person involved was very upset, as you can imagine, and from an animal welfare point of view we didn't want to do anything to the peacock that... This is during visitor opening hours and, of course, on the day where we had the Rolls Royce Society coming on a trip. So we then suddenly had to pull off people from various parts of the attraction to go and be Rolls Royce security. They didn't even notice the peacock, they thought we were giving them such an amazing service, they were delighted. They couldn't believe the amount of security we have in our car park.So, all this was kicking off, and we had a couple of emergency senior management meetings assembled that day to decide what ultimately the different options were. And in this meeting we discussed what should we do about the Channel 4 film crew, and everybody's instinct was, we're now involved with insurers, the insurers are saying, "It's a wild animal, so we can't really help you." But we'd just put on social media in National Gardening Week the week before that the head gardener has names for all the peacocks and has hand reared them, so there was kind of an insurance argument going on.We love the peacocks, and visitors absolutely love the peacocks, and they make Castle Howard really unique, so it's really difficult when you've told that story.It was like Jurassic Park, I'm not joking. It was absolutely carnage. All the peacocks then got wind of the fact that someone was trying to catch one of the crew and they started... There's a video from inside the main house, which Nick Howard took, of them all lined up on the windows pecking the glass. And I was thinking, they're now going to actually smash in the windows. They just went feral.But in this meeting we had this big debate then. This is all quite unusual, I guess, maybe not on a Tuesday in whatever it was, April, May. And I brought it up in this meeting, I said, "What are we going to do about Channel 4? We're not going to be able to keep this secret, really. We have to decide whether it's something where happy to let them film and cover, what's it's reality, it's what's going on."And Vicky Howard, to her credit, she said, "I think it's going to make excellent TV. If you're doing a year in the life at Castle Howard, you want to show some of the slightly more quirky things that go on." And it was reality, it was what happening. So we made the call to their exec producer and explained what was going on, and then obviously you won't be surprised to hear in episode one, which was aired week before last, the historic restoration of the windows does not make the cut, but the whole story of the peacock, which went from the sublime to the ridiculous over the next few days, does make the cut, and we've now got peacock merchandise in the gift shop for Christmas, and he's famous.Kelly Molson: You capitalised on every element. I love it.Abbigail Ollive: Yeah, we have. I think that's a good example. You've asked how... At the point where we go, I think we need to relinquish control. I can't storyboard this within an inch of its life. I can't actually control everything I want them to film. And this is going to make great TV.Kelly Molson: I mean, it makes great TV, but it also makes a great talk. I'm not going to lie listeners, I have heard this story before and I had to go on to speak after Abbi shared this with the room, so you can imagine just how my talk bummed the room. Outdone by a peacock. Thank you.Abbigail Ollive: I didn't think we were doing Secret life of the Zoo here, but as it turned out.Kelly Molson: Who knew? It's a brilliant story. I think what you said is, you just at some point have to relinquish control, because it is going to make good telly. It's a bonkers thing that happened that day, you had no way of... There was no part of planning that that was going to happen. It wasn't a normal thing that happens every day. Yes, you've got peacocks, but they don't normally go feral and start smashing up cars. What could have made for a better TV moment than that?Other than Peacockgate, is there anything else that surprised you about the process of the filming?Abbigail Ollive: Maybe that the people you think are going to be great characters sometimes aren't, and those who are really reluctant to feature and would naturally run a mile if you try to put them in front of a TV camera, often make the best TV. I think finding your stars and the really authentic people who are incredibly passionate about what they do. And in a place like Castle Howard those are people around every corner, people who are been working here for four generations and have amazing passion and connection with the place. And then those people who have really unusual skills, like my paint specialist, or people who are just doing incredibly niche things.I think it's not hard to find the stories, but I think it was that, really. There were people who I was trying to navigate the cameras away from and then there was really willing people who... I put myself in that category, I didn't mind at all being on film, but I think I just come across as a Blue Peter presenter, and actually there are funnier, more authentic, lovely people shining through on the series that we had to coerce a little bit more into being involved.I think that, again, it all comes back to the thing I said earlier about building trust. Our producers had a really good instinct for that. I think they managed really skillfully to get under the skin of the organisation, and by relinquishing control a bit and letting them do what they do really well and trusting their judgment, they ended up putting some of our people and scenarios and stories on TV that I definitely wouldn't have storyboarded, I don't think.Kelly Molson: I guess we talked about editing and control and stuff and relinquishing that a little bit earlier, but the series is out now, we'll give everyone the dates and we'll tell them where they can find it in a little while, but did you get the opportunity to watch it before it's been out live for people?Abbigail Ollive: It was a really small team of us who had a low res proof and we were allowed to, within the contract, check all of the facts and also have an opinion and push back on anything we thought might be reputationally damaging. And actually we changed a few facts and corrected people on some stuff. But I think we've been really pleased, actually, with the way in which it was edited and we haven't pushed back all that much.I think being able to watch it and absorb it a couple of times before giving the sign off, has been a really helpful layer. There were no massive surprises then when it's aired to a million people on TV, because there's already been a layer of fact checking. For me, that's about making sure people's job titles are correct or they're referred to in the right way. I don't want someone to have put a lot of time and effort into a filming sequence and then be called the wrong thing or credited in the wrong way, so I had that layer of editorial input. But ultimately what ends up in and what ends up not in is totally up to them.I think that's just one of the learnings, really. It's about managing people's expectations. The dog festival we do every year is a good example. We spent a whole weekend, and actually the weeks leading up to it, covering that as a story and lots of filming, lots of people being asked to do bits on camera and the various suppliers and providers we had at that big event, and it didn't make the cut at all. It's just because if they're here for the whole year, they decide, probably because of the peacock, actually, but they decide what flows in terms of their narrative, and we have to just manage people's expectations in that. Helpful for me to see it, so I can also do that, because I don't want everyone sat at home on a Saturday night watching for their bit and me knowing it's not in there.Kelly Molson: God, can you imagine? So you imagine that your paint history guy ready for his big moment, and then the peacock takes over. Yeah, that's an awful.Abbigail Ollive: I think internal communication, and I'm sort spending a lot of time, or have spent a lot of time, persuading people to be involved in filming, and then I have to do the bit of time explaining to people that, thanks for going above and beyond to organise that thing so we could film it, actually it's now not in the show.But I think one of the other things that it's maybe, I don't know if it's a surprise or not, but Castle Howard and a year in the life here is a microcosm for what's happening in the real world. And one of the other things we discussed quite a bit off camera as a senior team was how much we sugarcoat our narrative and want to look amazing and brilliant and positive, and in the end we decided it's better to be really transparent. You see our senior management team then in meetings with the cameras in the room, talking about how visitor numbers haven't been what we forecasted over the summer and cost of living crisis and the things that are happening in the real world.Because I think the risk was is that people would maybe watch this and think, "Well, they've got no grip on reality and what the challenges are that people are facing." So I think we had to just be very authentic and real.And we did debate that quite a lot, actually, because it's perhaps a slightly more exposing or brave thing to go, "Well, yeah, come into the senior management meeting, we're going to discuss the figures, we're going to discuss the reforecast. This is why we think numbers have perhaps dropped off. This is what we're going to do about it." And I think, hopefully, that gives viewers the sense of what goes into the running of the business.You see our, amazingly, they agreed to be filmed, you see our Ukrainian refugee family arriving in an estate cottage next week on the autumn episode, and it reflects what's happening on the estate here is what's happening in the rest of the world. And unbelievably as well, some of it's, like you said, some of it's luck and you couldn't plan exactly where the cameras were going to be at what point, but they were filming a senior management meeting at the moment where the announcement came through of the Queen's death, so they film the reaction to that as it's happening. And that could have happened at 10:00 at night when nobody was even in the building.Some of it is luck and a lot is planned, but it really is a reflection, I think, on the mood of the nation and what else is happening in the wider sector and political landscape and everything else. So I think, again, how I approached it was, we've got all these great stories to tell and this is who I want in it and what I want to feature, but actually as life happens and as the year progressed, you couldn't have planned half the things that have ended up in the show.Kelly Molson: No, not at all. But it does give it that authenticity about this is real, this is actually happening and this is our lives. It's not just a TV show.One thing that struck me, actually, was, when I was watching, there was a moment where one of the senior management teams said, "Look, I think we rule out the fact that overseas visitors are not coming. That's it." And it really made me think back about the last time you came on the podcast, which was in 2019, and when you came on then it was talking about the love affair that Castle Howard has with China and the amount of visitors that were driving through from a famous wedding that you'd had at the castle. And I just thought that is a complete and utter contrast, isn't it, to the things that we are now talking about now and that process and that experience that you've been through to get to this point.Abbigail Ollive: Because some of those foundations that we've really relied upon in terms of generating income, like our Chinese market, when that rug's pulled from under you, I think it's made us be maybe a bit more brave and risk taking in grasping opportunities that maybe we wouldn't have done in 2019. And I'd say this filming project is one of those, I absolutely put that in the category. We're in a position where we know some of those income streams aren't coming back, so putting ourselves in front of a huge audience and grasping that PR opportunity this year, I think is a direct result of how the world's changed in the last couple of years.Kelly Molson: Yeah, for sure. So, reflecting on the experience that you've been through, and it has literally just finished, you said that that they're now hastily editing the Christmas episode to go out soon, or winter episode, what advice would you give to other attractions that are thinking maybe we'll do it, maybe we'll start to have those conversations?Abbigail Ollive: Hopefully got a few nuggets. And also really happy to talk to anybody who is in the process of going into this, having now had some lived experience of it. But I think if you're open to filming in the first place, having clear contact details on the website. For location filming, and obviously this kind of thing as well, we produced a filming brochure, which is a PDF and a physical brochure, to kind of sell Castle Howard. Whilst this observational documentary obviously came to us as an opportunity, we're actively trying to sell ourselves as a filming location.I think reaching out to... If you've watched a program and you've really loved it, there's always credits at the end and you can kind of say, "Well, that's a really good example of something I'd love to replicate in my own workplace," and tracking down those people and setting up meetings and chats.Obviously we're part of the treasure houses group, there's 10 treasure houses that are privately owned stately homes in the country and we do a lot as a collective. We're attending a filming exhibition in London together called Focus in a couple of weeks time, and, as a group, making sure we're in those places, meeting the location managers, meeting the people in the industry, starting to form those relationships.The Christmas series this year that Channel 4 are doing, again, it features of the treasure houses and different ones to last year, so we're a repeat, I guess, in that it's winter for us, it's not necessarily just about Christmas. But then you'll see [inaudible 00:41:26] and Holkham as well. And Holkham were kind of going at it second time round, and Harewood for the first time.We've shared a lot of knowledge and talked a lot really about how we've approached it. And I've been a real advocate for it. I've encouraged those other houses, sorry, they might hate me for it now, to go for it, because we'd had such a positive experience last year with the team filming. I can vouch for the fact that they want to work with us and we're all pulling in the same direction.I think for us as well, my other bits of advice are, maximising the opportunity once it's happened. So making sure SEOs all working really hard for you. Making sure as soon as... We had to basically open all those doors to our website, because when a million people are watching you on Channel 4 on a Saturday night, we didn't want the website crashing. We wanted really clear calls to action about booking for Christmas and booking the cottages and campsite. Anything we can sell. When there's that opportunity of that many people Googling you, we wanted to make sure we were ready for it.We were also really aware that a lot of the people watching the TV show wouldn't necessarily be in the area or region and could just buy an admission ticket. We hope when the Christmas show goes out on the 3rd of December it will sell any final tickets remaining. It certainly did last year, but we've this year decided to do a virtual experience that people can buy, so we'll probably have that on sale to coordinate with the Christmas TV show going out. So for those people who are overseas or who can't get to Castle Howard this Christmas, there'll be a virtual tour, obviously inspired by places like London Transport Museum, who do their Hidden London tours, and plenty of theatre events do similar and do it really well.And then for us, maximising the press and PR opportunities that come out of the exposure. And then my other advice is the boring stuff, really. Making sure everything is covered from insurance and how we protect our assets. Having really clear guidelines for when the film crew's in the house, what they are and aren't permitted to do. Having all those access arrangements and risk assessments all agreed up front. So there's a leak on the roof, of course the film crew are going to want to be up on the roof at the moment when that happens, and you haven't got time to go through the whole process of doing a risk assessment and talking about insurance at that point. So it's kind of trying to think about all the scenarios up front and making sure all of that paperwork was done. So that's the boring stuff.And then communication, just communication, communication, you can't over communicate it. I found people get really grumpy if you turn up with a TV crew whilst they're busy in the middle of something highly important or some kind of high risk job, and I'm like, "Could we film you?" It generally doesn't go down brilliantly, so I've been an absolute stuck record in every meeting I've been in this year where I've been asking, "Can Channel 4 film it? Can Channel 4 film it?"And then making sure people are wearing something appropriate if I know people are going in to film them, like properly branded uniforms, and just giving people a heads up so they know that it's likely they're doing a thing as part of their day and I'm going to be along with a TV crew.But actually what's happened then is as the year has progressed, people have come forward more and more with opportunities. So people start letting me know, "We're doing a acorn picking," was one thing. I would never have known there was an acorn picking initiative going on in the forestry department. So people have been coming forward to me, and I've now got this brilliant content army of people letting me know what's going on in their week ahead, and they're actively thinking all the time, "This might make a great story for the TV." So I think you can't over communicate stuff.And then the final thing, which has been my mantra, it's absolutely obvious, but if you don't say it on camera, they can't put it on TV.Kelly Molson: Such simple advice.Abbigail Ollive: Simple advice.Kelly Molson: Abbi, this is going to be one of my favourite podcast episodes ever. You are always so generous with the advice that you give and the support that you give to the sector. So thank you for saying that you will help people and you're happy to talk to them. I think that's really amazing. We will put all of your details in the show notes so people can find out about you. But if you're not watching it already, how do we find out about the show? Where can we watch it?Abbigail Ollive: Yes, it's called Castle Howard: Through the Seasons. It's a Channel 4 production, so it's going out on Saturday nights, but more likely you'll be able to catch it with it on all four watch on demand. I'm sure it's something that will get repeated variously across the years, because that's great. They're busy repeating, I think, Chatsworth's documentary at the moment as well, and there's one happening at Highclere, and I think these things just kind of have quite a long shelf life actually, so hopefully you'll be able to watch it on demand way into the future, embarrassingly.Kelly Molson: For sure. Without a doubt. Abbi, we always ask our guests to share a book with us before they leave, something that they love or something that they've just enjoyed as part of their career or personal. What would you like to share with us?Abbigail Ollive: In my life outside of Castle Howard, I do a lot of baking and cooking. We have a little family business and cafe, so I'm a crazy baking lady some nights for that. But actually, it was difficult to choose, because I've got a whole amazing shelf of cookbooks that I use very regularly, but Sabrina Ghayour, who has recently released Persiana Everyday. I absolutely love Middle Eastern cooking, and I'm not really sure where this passion came from, but I think that particular book I've been using a lot recently, because it's good, quick recipes, they're really reliable, and they're brilliant midweek, not overly complex when you've got your store cupboard of ingredients sorted.But I actually chose this because it's something that... Our Channel 4 producer who's been with us for a year, Hannah, and I massively bonded over food, both being foodies, and I actually invited Sabrina to our press launch at Castle Howard because she's recently moved to the area, and funnily enough, I got a tweet, I got a DM tweet from Sabrina Ghayour saying, "You work at Castle Howard? I love Castle Howard." And I was like, "Oh my god, I mean, I love you. I've got your book and use it all the time. I can't believe you're trying to befriend me." So I invited her along to the press launch and she came, and Hannah, Channel 4 Hannah, and I had a proper fangirl moment of just basically going, "We really love your recipes." So it felt like a good, relevant, irrelevant one, although there were plenty I could have chosen.Kelly Molson: Oh my god, I am so with you on this. I have all of her bits except this one. Maybe I'll enter myself.Abbigail Ollive: Good Christmas present. Good Christmas-Kelly Molson: Yeah, there you go. They are the books I go to if we're having people over for dinner, or every New Year's Eve we cook a feast for the two of us, it would be three of us now, but we cook an absolute feast, and it's always lamb and it's always something incredibly delicious from one of her books. I think would've fangirled a little bit too.Abbigail Ollive: I know. And she uses our farm shop a lot, obviously, because we have estate tenant farmers, and I think it's really brilliant to champion that field to fork message. And if you're going to eat meat, it's brilliant that it's local. It's such a treat for me to be able to have a farm shop at work where I can and get that from. So yeah.Kelly Molson: Amazing. All right, well, look, listeners, as ever, if you want to be in with a chance of winning that book, if you go over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with, "I want Abbi's books, book even", you will be in with a chance of winning it.This is the second cookbook that we've had on the podcast recently as well. There's a little trend here. I'm getting a little message [inaudible 00:49:33].Abbigail Ollive: The other one that I was close, is when I was on holiday recently, I read, I'm sure somebody must have recommended it, the Bob Iger book, The Ride of a Lifetime, because he was the CEO of Disney for 15 years, and this week's just been announced that he's back at Disney after retirement. Not to go on as a prize, but for anybody working visitor attractions I found it a really inspiring read. The last paragraph of, well, sorry, the last chapter, really, is his bullet points of the kind of things he lived by whilst running Disney. I'm going to do the old school thing where I print it out and stick it on my wall. So that's just a top tip for the sector. I'm sure most people have read it and I'm, as usual, three years behind the trend.Kelly Molson: No, it not been recommended, though. It definitely has not come up on our... No, I will check our library list, but I am positive that that hasn't come up yet. But you can't win that one, it has to be Sabrina, because you will fully appreciate the cookbook. Trust me.Abbi, thanks so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure.Abbigail Ollive: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight, as always, to talk to you, and I do feel so honoured to be second time round.Kelly Molson: My absolute pleasure. You're always such a treat when you come on, and I genuinely am so grateful for all the support and advice that you give to people. So thank you.Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.Kelly Molson: Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast..

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VISION ON SOUND EPISODE 97 - TX AUGUST 14 2022 - UNDERMIND & OTHER 1960s TV

VISION ON SOUND

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2022 59:10

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 14th 2022 WARREN CUMMINGS is back again this week, as we are both transported back to the mid-1960s to have a chat about the obscure Science-Fiction adventure series UNDERMIND, an eleven part ABC television series starring Jeremy Wilkin and Rosemary Nichols. As ever with us, this sets us both off on a unexpectedly roundabout stroll through the television universe, and so, in the next hour we'll also touch upon the work of Robert Holmes, the apocalyptic nature of special effects technicians, another obscure series called THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE which was made by Granada TV, featured JOHN SHARP, and lasted for an astonishing four episodes in the mid 1960s. We also touch briefly upon its contemporary spy series, THE AVENGERS and THE PRISONER before turning our attention to modern day children's television as more channels are announced as being on the brink of extinction. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

vision sound abc avengers prisoners science fiction 1960s john sharp robert holmes granada tv undermind tx august

Dom Phillips (pictured), Stephen S. Thompson, Caroline Drummond, Maureen Hiron

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2022 28:09

Matthew Bannister on Dom Phillips, the freelance journalist who was ambushed and shot dead on a trip into the Amazon rain forest. Stephen S. Thompson, the novelist and screenwriter who won a BAFTA for his TV drama telling the story of his brother's experiences during the Windrush scandal. Caroline Drummond, who campaigned for greater links between farming and environmental protection – and oversaw the launch of Open Farm Sunday. Maureen Hiron, the top-class bridge player who invented many new games including Continuo and Quizwrangle. Producer: Neil George Interviewed guest: Sian Phillips Interviewed guest: Sylvia Colombo Interviewed guest: Anthony Bryan Interviewed guest: Krishnendu Majumdar Interviewed guest: Minette Batters Interviewed guest: Ian Pigott Interviewed guest: W. Eric Martin Interviewed guest: Deej Johnson Archive clips used: BBC News 24, Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira 16/06/2022; Metrópoles - Café da Manhã Com Jornalistas 14/06/2022; BBC News Online, Amber Rudd's regret over scale of Windrush problem 26/04/2018; Edinburgh Television Festival, Sitting in Limbo - Edinburgh TV Festival 2021 12/06/2021; Left Bank Pictures/BBC/Ian Johnson Publicity, BBC Trailers Sitting in Limbo 01/06/2020; BAFTA, Sitting in Limbo wins Single Drama BAFTA TV Awards 2021 06/06/2021; BBC Radio 4, The Archers 07/06/2019; BBC Two, A Will To Win 20/10/1986; Granada TV, The Krypton Factor 1993.

tv amazon sitting thompson phillips bbc radio limbo bafta drummond bbc news metr archers windrush pictured bbc two dom phillips amber rudd granada tv matthew bannister open farm sunday

Baroness Haleh Afshar, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Kay Mellor, Vangelis (Pictured)

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2022 28:11

Matthew Bannister on Baroness Haleh Afshar, the Iranian-born academic and activist who made her home in the UK and campaigned for women's rights. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emir of Abu Dhabi and President of the United Arab Emirates who led the transformation of his country and was a key ally of the West. Kay Mellor, the TV writer best known for series like 'Band of Gold', 'Fat Friends' and 'The Syndicate'. Vangelis, the prolific composer who won an Oscar for the soundtrack to the film 'Chariots of Fire'. Producer: Neil George Interviewed guest: Molly Newton Interviewed guest: Janet Veitch OBE. Interviewed guest: Sameer Hashmi. Interviewed guest: Paul Allen. Archive clips used: BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs - Baroness Haleh Afshar 28/12/2008; FOX 5 New York, The first minutes of the reporting of the 9/11 attacks from WNYW 11/09/2001; BBC Radio 4, Today Programme - Kay Mellor tribute 18/05/2022; BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs - Kay Mellor OBE 29/10/2017; Granada TV, Band of Gold (1995); Rollem Productions/ Tiger Aspect Productions/ Yorkshire Television, Fat Friends 2000; Isolde Films, Vangelis and the Journey to Ithaka - Documentary (2013); Al Jazeera English, Vangelis: A Message of Hope 22/01/2012.

Derek Mack (pictured), June Brown, Doris Derby, Dave Sales

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2022 27:50

Matthew Bannister on Derek Mack, the rocket engineer who helped Britain enter the space age June Brown, the actor best known as Dot Cotton in Eastenders Dr Doris A. Derby, the American civil rights activist and photographer who took historic pictures of the struggle for equality Dave Sales, the Dorset fisherman who fought a 23 year campaign to protect the sea bed in Lyme Bay. Producer: Neil George Interviewed guest: Dion Mack Interviewed guest: Ken MacTaggart Interviewed guest: Bob Banks Interviewed guest: Hannah Collins Interviewed guest: Gill Sales Archive clips used: British Pathé, The Black Knight Rocket 1958; BBC One, The One Show - The Rocket Men 25/01/2019; BBC TV Archive, Black Arrow Project - 24 Hours 27/10/1971; BBC One, Eastenders, 1985-2020; BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs - June Brown 17/02/2017; British Movietone, V E Day in London 1945; Granada TV, Coronation Street, 19/08/1970; Library of Congress, Southern Oral History Program in North Carolina - Doris Derby Interview 2011; Storylines, Guardians of the Reef Project - Interview with David Sales 27/07/2017.

american sales britain guardians derby storylines bbc radio library of congress dorset eastenders coronation street bbc one pictured ve day june brown dot cotton granada tv matthew bannister southern oral history program

Episode 145: “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles

The Doctor of Digital™ GMick Smith, PhD

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2022

This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article." Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show. Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me". The other, "Day Tripper", was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV, The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though. As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]

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What Promising Gigs Changed Music Forever for the Better? The TuneSmith Series Episode PP The Doctor of Digital™ GMick Smith, PhD

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2022 14:27

Five decades after David Bowie's seminal tour, we reflect on the concerts that have left a mark.Billie HolidayCafé Society, New York City, early 1939The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. The birth of bebopMinton's Playhouse, New York City, 1941Rising young originals such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the guitarist Charlie Christian lived off commercial swing gigs in 1941, but they forged the revolutionary modern jazz style called bebop in tumultuous after-hours Harlem jam sessions, where Thelonious Monk and the drums innovator Kenny Clarke were in the house band. Buddy Holly and the CricketsUK tour, March 1958Britain had never seen a rock band before March 1958. Then, for 25 consecutive nights, came the first true rock band – guitar, bass and drums, a revolution in horn-rimmed specs. A schoolboy Keith Richards caught a London show, but many more future stars would see Buddy Holly on TV during his visit, when he appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Muddy WatersWhalley Range, Manchester, 7 May 1964It was the brilliant idea of the Granada TV producer Johnnie Hamp to film a selection of blues greats in south Manchester's derelict Wilbraham Road railway station, mocked up to looked like the deep south, with “wanted” posters, washtubs and even goats and chickens. About 200 people arrived by rail to see the Gospel and Blues Train: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann and the duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee giving intense performances on the platform. Waters was mobbed by blues-mad youngsters. Tharpe arrived in a pony and trap and seized the opportunity presented by a Mancunian downpour to strap on an electric guitar and launch spontaneously into Didn't It Rain? Countless musicians, including Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, subsequently told Hamp they were influenced by the show, which broadcast to millions and was instrumental in taking the blues explosion to the mainstream. Bob DylanNewport folk festival, Rhode Island, 25 July 1965 It was a Sunburst Fender Stratocaster that stole the show at Newport in 1965. Dylan's decision to play an electric guitar on a largely acoustic bill stunned the crowd, with many booing and jeering. Audiences for his world tour were similarly polarised, one disgruntled heckler in Manchester yelling: “Judas!” at the former folk hero. Essentially, it was the birth of folk rock – the real-time expansion of a genre. Frankie Valli and the Four SeasonsFranklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania, 1966A show in a college gym was the breakthrough that made arena rock possible. The PA system supplied by the Clair brothers so impressed Valli that he took them on tour as his personal sound engineers. Other artists noticed the quality and soon they were in demand. Their sound systems spurred rock's spread to the big halls. The Velvet UndergroundThe Dom, New York City, 7 April 1966A former Polish wedding hall hosted the birth of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Andy Warhol showed films and worked the lights, his “superstars” danced and the Velvet Underground played at a volume witnesses tended to describe in terms of violence: rock music as envelopment and sensory assault. The BeatlesCandlestick Park, San Francisco, 29 August 1966The Beatles' final real gig wasn't a great show. The stadium was half-empty, the band at the end of their tether, struggling to recreate the sound of their latest recordings. But it represented a shift in rock music: no more Beatles gigs meant more time in the studio – and albums that would change everything, again. The 14 Hour Technicolor DreamAlexandra Palace, London, 29 April 1967British counterculture's coming-out ball. Every one of the country's psychedelic luminaries played – Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Tomorrow and the Pretty Things among them. Performance art was provided by Yoko Ono, while the sense that the audience was as much part of the spectacle as the artists presaged 80s rave culture. Big Brother and the Holding CompanyJanis Joplin as part of Big Brother and the Holding CompanyJanis Joplin at Monterey as part of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Monterey pop festival, California, 17 June 1967Arriving at Monterey with a lesser-known San Francisco psychedelic bluesy rock band, 24-year-old Janis Joplin gleefully demolished every stereotype of the “demure” female singer. The hard-living, hard-rocking Texan's raucous, gut-wrenching performance attracted international attention and has been described as one of the greatest ever. Terry RileyPhiladelphia College of Art, 17 November 1967Not the birth of minimalism, but certainly its breakthrough. Riley's eight-hour set of tape manipulation and organ pulses, played to an audience seated on hammocks and cushions, generated an early recording of his classic Poppy Nogood and set the pace for electronic experimentalism in chill-out environments decades ahead. James Brown‘Are we together or we ain't?' James Brown calms stage invaders on 5 April 1968.Boston Garden, 5 April 1968The night after the assassination of Martin Luther King, violent protests spread across many US cities. In Boston, Brown's show was almost cancelled for fear it might become a hotspot for public outcry. Instead, the show was repurposed: broadcast live on TV and radio in an effort to ease the grief and tension. Fans climbed on stage as he sang I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me); police officers rallied. Brown paused the song. “I'll be fine,” he told the officers, then turned to the stage invaders: “You're not being fair to yourselves and me, or your race. Now, I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people … Are we together or we ain't?” The crowd cheered. The fans climbed down. Brown turned to the drummer: “Hit that thing, man.” Mahalia Jackson and Mavis StaplesHarlem cultural festival, New York City, 13 July 1969Effectively buried until the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul resurrected its memory, the 1969 Harlem cultural festival was possibly the greatest selection of black talent ever assembled, from Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone. If you had to pick a highlight, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples' charged performance of Take My Hand, Precious Lord might be it. Jimi HendrixJimi Hendrix at WoodstockWoodstock festival, New York, 18 August 1969Often cited as the gig that defined the 60s, the countercultural festival attracted half a million people to upstate New York. Hendrix's deconstruction of The Star-Spangled Banner was interpreted as a protest at the Vietnam war, while “three days of peace and love” showed that people power could change history. The WhoThe University of Leeds, 14 February 1970A Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque outside the university's refectory now honours the site of the incendiary live performance of the post-Tommy, Keith Moon-era Who captured on Live at Leeds, often cited as the greatest live rock album. Elton JohnThe Troubadour, Los Angeles, 25 August 1970Not quite overnight success, but close: Elton John walked on to the stage of a celebrity-packed Troubadour a largely unknown British singer-songwriter, and walked off it a star. Aside from the music, a backstage decision to wear an outrageous outfit and a burst of energetic showmanship midway through the gig helped: two lessons he has never forgotten. BB KingCook County jail, 10 September 1970Two years after Johnny Cash's turn at Folsom prison, the blues legend King performed in Chicago to an audience of 2,000 prisoners, mostly young and black. A subsequent live album highlighted the dire conditions at the jail, helping bring about prison reform, which became a lifelong cause for King. Aretha Franklin at Fillmore West5-7 March 1971Franklin's appearance at Fillmore West wasn't a star-making performance – she was already very much a star – but it featured the Queen of Soul at the peak of her powers, actively seeking to build a bridge to a post-hippy audience, covering Stephen Stills, Bread and the Beatles. Judging by the crowd's reaction, it worked. David BowieHammersmith Odeon, London, 3 July 1973The moment when David Bowie appears to announce his retirement during this show is astonishing: the crowd's screams become a vast howl of disappointment, peppered with yells of “No!” Did he mean it? Bob Marley & the WailersThe Lyceum, London, 17-18 July 1975Probably the most dynamic and exhilarating reggae concerts ever. Perhaps more importantly, the presentation was familiar enough to the rock establishment to allow them to feel comfortable with roots reggae. The Last WaltzWinterland Ballroom, San Francisco, 25 November 1976This Thanksgiving Day show was billed as the Band's “farewell concert appearance”. Sex PistolsRiver Thames, 7 June 1977Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118 E: mick.smith@wsiworld.com Commercials Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-1-commercials Narratives Voice Talent:https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/track-2-narrativesDo you want a free competitive analysis? Let me know at:https://hubs.ly/Q0139TgJ0Website:https://www.wsiworld.com/mick-smithLinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/wsi-smith-consulting/Make an appointment:https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/mick-smithBe sure to subscribe, like, & review The Doctor of Digital™ Podcast:https://www.spreaker.com/show/g-mick-smith-phds-tracksSign up for the Doctor Up A Podcast course:https://doctor-up-a-podcast.thinkific.com/

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Bamber Gascoigne (pictured), Norma Waterson, Claire Tomlinson, Thich Nhat Hanh

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2022 28:03

Matthew Bannister on Bamber Gascoigne, the broadcaster and author best known as the long serving host of the TV quiz show 'University Challenge'. Norma Waterson, the revered singer who was part of the Waterson Carthy dynasty that played a leading role in the English folk revival. We have a personal tribute from her husband Martin Carthy and daughter Eliza Carthy. Claire Tomlinson, who broke down barriers to become one of the UK's best polo players. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese-born Buddhist monk known as the 'father of mindfulness'. Producer: Neil George Interviewed guest: Christina Gascoigne Interviewed guest: Wasfi Kani Interviewed guest: Martin Carthy Interviewed guest: Eliza Carthy Interviewed guest: Mark Tomlinson Interviewed guest: Brother Phap Huu Interviewed guest: Jeff Wilson Archive clips used: BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs 01/11/1987; Granada TV, University Challenge 01/09/1987; BBC Two, The Young Ones - Bambi 08/05/1984; Granada TV, The Christians e03 The Birth of Europe 16/08/1977; BBC Radio 3, Music Matters 31/03/2018; BBC Radio 4, The King of Games 21/08/1984; BBC SOUND ARCHIVE, Hurlingham vs Scotland 02/09/1980; YouTube / Is Secret, Namo Avalokiteshvara Plum Village Chanting 13/08/2014; BBC Two, Arena: Stories My Country Told Me 14/07/1996.

The Beatles in Manchester

Beatles60

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 4, 2022 67:00

The Beatles first played at the Oasis Club on February 2, 1962. Six days later they were at The Playhouse Theatre to audition for a BBC radio performance. They passed the audition, so on March 7 they were back at the same theatre to record three songs for the BBC radio show, “Teenager's Turn – Here We Go.” It was the first time they wore suits in front of an audience. The show was aired the next day. What do all of these things have in common? They all took place in Manchester! Note: on a special page we've compiled 43 informative and entertaining links that'll take you on a deep dive into all that's discussed in this episode. See: https://barmyoldcodger.com/beatles60-podcast The Beatles wisely chose Manchester as their first opening to the nation. In retrospect, it makes good sense to include Manchester among "Beatles cities" that would propel the group to the toppermost (alongside Liverpool, Hamburg, New York and London). Located about 35 miles east of Liverpool, Manchester was in 1962 (and still is) the prime gateway for all media in the North of England. Radio appearances recorded in Manchester and their first television appearance filmed by Manchester's Granada TV would give The Beatles their first national exposure. It could be said that Manchester wasn't just a random stop along the way to London. It was the main route that had to be taken. In this episode of the Beatles60 podcast, we have some special guests! Beatles historian Steve Bradley and radio presenter Phil Salter are area natives. They're the voices behind the mics on the Arrive Without Travelling podcast. It's an information-packed discussion, and our guests make it perfectly clear that the Beatles' path to nationwide fame would begin in Manchester, the north's media centre. Listen or Share via YouTube: https://youtu.be/K_56fuTuP0o Arrive Without Travelling (radio show & podcast) https://arrivewithouttravelling.com/radio-%26-podcast Lots of Manchester links! https://www.facebook.com/113527093818469/posts/497399238764584/ NOTE! We give you a nice long list of links for each episode. The links are almost as interesting as the podcast! See: https://beatles60.group/blog --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/beatles60/message

Mary Maher, Robbie Shakespeare (pictured), Anwar Ditta, Anne Rice

Leicester City FC | Leicester till I Die

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2021 27:58

Matthew Bannister on The journalist and feminist Mary Maher. She edited the women's page of the Irish Times and was a prime mover in campaigns for equal rights. The bass player Robbie Shakespeare. With his partner Sly Dunbar he formed a powerful rhythm section in demand by artists from Peter Tosh and Black Uhuru to Grace Jones, Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. Anwar Ditta, the British Asian mother who fought for five years to be allowed to bring her three children from Pakistan to the UK. Anne Rice the best-selling author of the Vampire Chronicles series of books. Producer: Neil George Interviewed guest: Rosita Sweetman Interviewed guest: Michael Foley Interviewed guest: Don Chandler Interviewed guest: David Katz Interviewed guest: Tariq Mehmood Interviewed guest: Ruth Bundey Interviewed guest: Dr Samantha George Archive clips used: RTE, Bowman - Tribute to Mary Maher 12/12/2021; GRANADA TV, World in Action: These Children Are Mine 16/03/1981; Oxford Television Production/BBC FOUR, Cover Stories - Anne Rice 25/06/2002; BBC Radio 4, Front Row - Tribute to Anne Rice 13/12/2021; Geffen Pictures, Interview With The Vampire (1994); Anne Rice YouTube Channel, Returning to Christianity 07/05/2010.

LTIDtv In Conversation with Elton Welsby

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2021 63:12

Chris is joined by Elton Welsby, the face of football on ITV in the mid 1980's and regular host of sports& in particular Kick Off on Granada TV.

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SonicPeace#One - Sound for Life - Total Immersion Sound Bath for Stress Relief & Deep Relaxation

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 6, 2021 29:40

Sound healing is one of the oldest forms of natural relaxation, stress relief and healing and has been practiced in many cultures and civilisations for thousands of years. More recently the emergence of modern sound therapy has lead to an increasing body of research showing the physiological & psychological benefits of sound healing but you only have to hear the sound of the ocean waves or a babbling stream to feel the transformational power and the positive benefits of healing sound. Harmonic vibrations created by overtone-emitting instruments such as tuned percussion, singing bowls & gongs can stimulate the alpha and theta brain waves associated with a deep meditative and restful state that is highly conducive to healing - sound massage for the body, mind & soul. Some of the positive effects of sound healing, sound meditation & gong baths are.. • Induces deep relaxation, calming the mind and helping to release muscle tension • Lowers anxiety & stress and lead to improved sleep • Enhanced mental focus, creativity, concentration, awareness & insight • Awaken a sense of physical and mental harmony and an increased sense of welbeing • Effective natural pain relief and can promote faster recovery from injury & illnesses Create a sonic space for renewal, reflection and transformation with this powerful music, the perfect musical ambience for relaxing at home as well as for #yoga, #pilates, #massage, #healing therapies and #bodywork. Lie down in a warm and comfortable place, and be totally immersed in blissful sound and vibration. Hit play and de-stress! **** Silencio Music is an independent music production company with a focus on high quality ambient music for hypnosis, meditation & therapeutic relaxation. The music is based on clinical research & healing traditions and has been specially composed in collaboration with practitioners to produce an audio library of tracks specifically tailored to the needs of health professionals & therapists. Licenses are available from Silencio Music which allow you to legitimately use our tracks and collections both as therapeutic background music and to create your own guided meditations, hypnosis audio products, videos, websites & mobile applications. Chris Mullett – Founder & Composer My music combines both acoustic & digital instruments with voice & ambient recordings to create flowing tracks which emanate peace, tranquility and harmony. I am constantly searching for new resonant sounds, rhythms & musical forms & have a deep interest in the power of music in both traditional and contemporary healing practices. I have over 20 years experience in composing music for meditation, hypnotherapy, relaxation and yoga & also compose music for film, theatre, dance and TV including work with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Young Vic, Channel 4 Films & Granada TV. https://calmsonic.com/ https://silenciomusic.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/SilencioMusic https://www.facebook.com/SilencioBlissfulMusic https://www.linkedin.com/in/silencio/

Born Under A Lucky Star With TV Comedian Lenny Windsor

Secrets For An Inspirational Life With Mimi Novic

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2021 65:44

In today's episode I talk to award winning TV comedian Lenny Windsor. Lenny began performing at an early age as a bass player in his father's big band where he discovered his real love and talent for comedy at the age of 16. Playing the usual circuits such as pubs and clubs Lenny was finally given his big break in Britain, when he appeared in shows such as Granada TV's The Comedians, the BBC's Summertime Special, That's Rich, The Oxford Road Show and LWT's Knees Up. He also wrote and presented The Cut Price Comedy Show, Lenny Windsor at Windsor, and An Evening with Lenny Windsor. Lenny was a writer for Benny Hill dealing with Benny on a one-to-one basis and supplying both routines, sketches and jokes for this worldwide star. He has appeared at every major theatre in the UK, and made countless television appearances, as well as well as entertaining at the Her Majesty the Queen's home at Windsor Great Park. He has appeared with great acts such as Gloria Gaynor, Roy Orbisson, Carol Lawrence, The Supremes, Johnny Mathis, The Temptations amongst many other world class singers. He regularly appears in America, recently in Las Vegas appearing with Mr. Vegas himself ‘George Wallace' and appearing in the NEW reality TV show ‘Inspecting Vegas'. A charming, witty and delightful walk through Lenny's colourful and blessed life. We talk about all things showbiz, the stars he's worked with and how he followed his dream to become one of the leading comedians of our time.

Episode 131: “I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2021

Episode one hundred and thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes, and is the start of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as too many of the songs were by the Supremes. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era. The Supremes biography I relied on most is The Supremes by Mark Ribowsky, which seems factually accurate but questionable in its judgments of people. I also used this omnibus edition of Mary Wilson's two volumes of autobiography. This box set contains everything you could want by the Supremes, but is extraordinarily expensive in physical form at the moment, though cheap as MP3s. This is a good budget substitute, though oddly doesn't contain “Stop in the Name of Love”. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hi, this is Andrew. Between recording this episode and it going live, three great musicians, two of whom have been the subject of episodes of this podcast, sadly died. We lost Don Everly, Charlie Watts, and Tom T. Hall, and I just wanted to acknowledge them and their contributions to music before the episode starts. They'll all be missed. [theme music] Just a brief note before we start to say that this episode contains brief mentions of eating disorders, so if that might be a problem for you, check the transcript to make sure it's safe. Thanks. We've spent much of the last few months looking at the intersections of three different movements, each of which was important -- the influence of the Beatles and to a lesser extent the other Merseybeat bands, the influence of Bob Dylan and the folk and protest movement, and the British R&B guitar bands who were taking their interpretation of the sound of Chess Records back to the USA. But of course, while these guitar bands were all influencing everyone, they were also being influenced by the growth of soul, and in particular by Motown, and Motown's groups were among the few American acts who managed to keep having hits during the British Invasion. Indeed, 1965 was as much of a creative and commercial peak for the label as for the white guitar bands we've been looking at. So for the next few weeks we're going to move over to Detroit, and we're going to look at Motown. And this week and next week we're going to continue our look at the Holland-Dozier-Holland collaboration, and at the groups they were writing for. So today, we're going to look at the Supremes, at the career of the only Black act to seriously challenge the Beatles for chart dominance in the sixties and at the start of the inter-group rivalries that eventually took them down. We're going to look at "I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "I Hear a Symphony"] When we last looked at the Supremes, they had just had their second number one single. After having spent years being called "the no-hit Supremes" and recording third-rate material like "The Man With the Rock and Roll Banjo Band", they'd been taken on by Holland, Dozier, and Holland, Motown's new star songwriting team, and had recorded two songs written and produced by the team -- "Where Did Our Love Go?" and "Baby Love" -- both of which had reached number one. But there were already tensions in the group. Most notably, there was the tension between Florence Ballard and Diana Ross. Ballard had always considered herself the lead singer of the group, and almost everyone who knew the group at the time agreed that Ballard was the better singer. But Berry Gordy, the owner of Motown, thought that Ross was the member of the group who had actual star potential, and insisted that she be the lead vocalist on everything the Supremes cut. At first, this didn't matter too much -- after all, no matter who the lead singer on the records was, they were having the huge hits they'd always dreamed of -- but it inevitably led to friction within the group. But in late 1964, at least, everyone was on the same page. Berry Gordy, in particular, was delighted by the group's continued success -- they had been the *only* act other than the Beatles or Bobby Vinton to have more than one number one on the pop charts in 1964 -- and by the end of the year, they had released their third, "Come See About Me". "Come See About Me" actually got released only a month after "Baby Love", before the latter had even reached the top of the charts, and it seems like a ridiculous idea to release another single so close to that one. But it came out so early to make sure the Supremes had the hit with it. Because a soundalike had come out on Wand Records even before the Supremes' single came out. A fourteen-year-old girl called Nella Dodds had decided that she could sing quite a bit like Diana Ross, and since the Supremes were the biggest female group in the country at this point, she had a chance at being a star, too. She'd auditioned for Wand by singing along with the whole of the first Supremes album, and Wand Records had decided that she sounded enough like Ross that it was worth a shot putting out a single by her. They chose "Come See About Me", which had been released as an album track on that album, and put out this: [Excerpt: Nella Dodds, "Come See About Me"] Dodds' version of the track was cut to be a soundalike, and was so similar to the Supremes version that it's actually quite easy to cut between the two records. You can hear the joins, but they're *spookily* similar: [Excerpt: The Supremes and Nella Dodds, "Come See About Me", alternating phrases] That wasn't the only time a Holland-Dozier-Holland production would be copied wholesale -- we'll hear another, slightly less blatant, example later this episode. As Dodds' single started to rise up the charts, Berry Gordy got furious. If the record sounded good enough to be a hit single, his label was going to have the hit with it, and so the Supremes' version of "Come See About Me" was rush-released. It went to number one, and Nella Dodds vanished into obscurity. The group having three number one hits in a row focused everyone's minds, and Gordy held a meeting with Holland, Dozier, and Holland, and told them that from that point on the Supremes had to be their number one priority. They should drop everything they were doing and concentrate on making Supremes hits while the Supremes were having their moment of success. And so of course they did just that -- and in January 1965 they recorded the album which would contain the Supremes' fourth number one in a row: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Stop! In the Name of Love"] The story of how "Stop! In the Name of Love" was conceived tells us a lot about the kind of life that the people at Motown were living, now they were all successful and making a great deal of money. The way Lamont Dozier tells the story, his marriage had fallen apart, and he was sleeping with multiple women, some of whom thought they were the only one. Dozier would regularly head to a motel near Hitsville for some of these assignations, and one day while he was there with one of his women, another one tracked him down. The woman he was with made her escape, and Dozier tried to make excuses, claiming he had just got very tired at work and booked a motel room to have a rest so he wouldn't have to go all the way home. His girlfriend didn't believe this rather transparent lie, and started throwing things at him. Dozier started yelling at her to stop it, and eventually mangled the phrase "Stop in the name of the law", shouting instead "Stop in the name of love!" Dozier immediately saw this line as the basis of a song, and his burst of inspiration amused the woman, who started laughing. It defused the situation, and led to a hit record. [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Stop! In the Name of Love"] Indeed, Dozier wasn't the only one whose experiences made up part of the lyrics for the song. All three of Holland, Dozier, and Holland were having complex love lives and going through the breakup of their first marriages. Eddie Holland has said that he used his own experiences in that regard in writing the lyrics to that song. All three men were having affairs with multiple women, but two of those affairs were important in their working lives -- Brian Holland was dating Diana Ross, while Lamont Dozier was seeing Mary Wilson. According to Eddie Holland, Florence seemed to think that this meant that the remaining members of their respective trios should also pair up, but Holland didn't think that he should get involved, given Florence's mental fragility and his own promiscuous nature. Both Lamont and Brian later split up with their respective Supremes partners, but luckily everyone was professional enough that they were all able to continue working together. After "Stop! In the Name of Love" came "Back in Your Arms Again", making five number ones in a row for the combination of the Supremes and Holland-Dozier-Holland. On top of this, Holland-Dozier-Holland were busily making hits for the Four Tops, who we'll hear more about next week, and for the Isley Brothers, as well as writing odd songs for other artists like Marvin Gaye. To put this into perspective, at this point the *only* act ever to have had five number ones in a row on the US charts was Elvis, who had done it twice. The Beatles were about to hit their fifth, and would eventually get to six number ones in a row -- they had eleven in the UK, but many more Beatles singles were released in the US than in the UK, so there were more opportunities to break the streak. That was the company the Supremes were in. It's important to stress how big the Supremes, Motown, and Holland-Dozier-Holland were in 1965. There were twenty-seven Billboard number one singles that year, and six of them were from Motown -- compared to five from the Beatles and two from the Rolling Stones. Of those six number one Motown singles, five of them were Holland-Dozier-Holland productions, and four were by the Supremes. Of course, number one records are not the only measure of success in the music industry, but they are definitely a measure. By that measure, the Supremes were bigger than anyone except the Beatles, but this led to a certain amount of dissatisfaction among the rest of the Motown acts. They were being told that a rising tide would lift all boats, but the way they saw it, everyone who wasn't a Supreme was being ignored, unless they were named Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye. The Vandellas, for example, thought that records like "Dancing in the Street", which made number two in the charts, could have easily made number one had they been given the same kind of promotion as the Supremes. This was, to them, particularly evident when it came to the first British tour of the Motortown Revue, in March 1965. While the various Motown acts were on tour in the UK, the opportunity came up to do a TV special for Granada TV, presented by Dusty Springfield, who was the driving force behind the special. Springfield was particularly an admirer of Martha and the Vandellas, and got Martha to duet with her on her own hit "Wishin' and Hopin'": [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield and Martha Reeves, "Wishin' and Hopin'"] Yet while all the acts on the tour -- the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Miracles, and the Temptations -- got their moments in the spotlight on the show, the Supremes did seem to dominate it, with more songs than any of the other acts. This was partly just good sense -- Motown was only just starting to have a presence in the UK, and to the extent it did the Supremes were almost the only Motown artists that had made any impression on the public consciousness at all at this point -- but it was also because Berry Gordy was becoming increasingly infatuated with Diana Ross, and they finally consummated their relationship in Paris at the end of the tour. Now, it is important to note here that this is always portrayed in every book about the group or Motown as "scheming Diana Ross used her feminine wiles to seduce hapless Berry Gordy, who was helplessly under her spell.” That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that Berry Gordy was a thirty-five-year-old married man sleeping with an employee of his who had only just turned twenty-one, and who had been his employee for several years. I wouldn't mention any of this at all -- I despise the gossiping nature of much music writing -- except that it is impossible to read anything at all about the Supremes without getting a take on the group's career from this point on that has Ross using her sexuality to manipulate Gordy in order to fulfil her own scheming ambition. I think there's no question at all that Ross was ambitious, but I think most of the narrative about her is rooted in misogyny, and a very deep misunderstanding of the power dynamics in her relationship with Gordy. But there is absolutely no question that Gordy saw the Supremes as the most important act on Motown -- and that he saw Diana Ross as the most important part of the Supremes. And decisions made for the benefit of Ross were not always decisions that would benefit her colleagues. For example, at this point in time, the fashion was for women to be very curvy, rather than thin. Ross was extremely thin, and so the group's outfits were padded. This wasn't such a problem for Mary, who had her own issues about a lack of curves, but for Florence, who was bigger than the other two, it was humiliating, because it made her look bigger than she was, and there was no question of the padding being removed from her clothes -- the decisions were being made on the basis of what made Diana look good. Of course, fashions change, and with the rise of the supermodel Twiggy, suddenly a more emaciated look became popular, so the group were able to drop the padding -- but that still left Florence as the unfashionable-looking one. She became deeply insecure about this, though she would hide it with humour -- after Twiggy became popular, there was a scripted bit of the show where Ross would say "thin is in", and Florence ad libbed "but fat is where it's at!", and her ad lib became part of the routine. After the Supremes' run of five number one singles, it might have seemed that they were invulnerable, but in September 1965, "Nothing But Heartaches" came out, and it only made number eleven: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “Nothing But Heartaches”] For any other act, this would be a major hit, but for an act that had had five number one hits in a row, it was a failure, and it was treated as such, even though it sold over a million copies. Berry Gordy actually sent out a memo to all Motown creative staff, saying "We will release nothing less than top ten product on any artist: and because the Supremes' world-wide acceptance is greater than the other artists, on them we will only release number-one records". Of course, that was easier said than done -- every songwriter and producer wanted only to be making number one records, after all, but it's a symptom of the attitudes that were showing up at Motown by this point -- a number eleven hit for a group that two years earlier had been laughed at for being the "no hit Supremes" was now regarded as a failure to be punished, while major successes were just to be considered the norm. But it's also a tribute to how successful Holland, Dozier, and Holland were by this point that the next Supremes single was, once again, another number one hit. The inspiration for "I Hear a Symphony" came from Dozier thinking about how characters in films often had musical motifs on the soundtrack, and how ridiculous it would be if people in real life walked around with their own musical accompaniments. But it might also be that the writing trio had something else in mind. In August, just over a month before the recording of "I Hear a Symphony", a girl group called The Toys had released a single called "A Lover's Concerto": [Excerpt: The Toys, "A Lover's Concerto"] That song had been based on a piece of music usually incorrectly attributed to Bach, but actually by the Baroque composer Christian Petzold, and had been written by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, two writers who usually wrote for the Four Seasons, whose four-on-the-floor style was very similar to that of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. Linzer and Randell had even put in a little nod to the Supremes in the song. Compare the intro of the Toys record: [Excerpt: The Toys, "A Lover's Concerto"] With the intro from "Stop! In the Name of Love!": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Stop! In the Name of Love!"] The section from eight through sixteen seconds on the Toys record is so close to the section from eleven through nineteen seconds on the Supremes one that you can play them almost together -- I had to do a tiny splice five seconds in here because the musicians on the Toys record don't have the perfect timing of the Funk Brothers and drifted by 0.1 seconds, but I hope you can see just how close those two sections are: [Excerpt: The Supremes and The Toys together] See what I mean? The Toys' record reached number two on the charts -- not a number one, but better than the most recent Supremes record. So it might well be that Holland, Dozier, and Holland were also thinking about the Toys' record when they came to make their new one -- especially since it had contained a little nod to their own work. And the odd thing about that section is it's not integral to the Toys record at all -- it's just there, I think, as a nod and a wink to anyone listening for it. Certainly, Holland, Dozier, and Holland were aware of the Toys record -- they had the Supremes cut a cover version of it for the I Hear a Symphony album. That album also contained the Supremes' version of the Beatles' "Yesterday" -- another hit which had, of course, referenced classical music, with its string quartet backing. One hit record referencing classical music might be a fluke, but two was a pattern, and so whatever the writers' later claims about the inspiration, it's reasonable to suspect that at the very least they were paying close attention to this pattern. The lyrics to "I Hear a Symphony" were written in a rush. The original plan had been for the group to release a song called "Mother Dear" as their next single, but then Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier came up with the track and title for "I Hear a Symphony", and knew it would be a winner. There was one problem, though -- the single needed to be out relatively quickly, and the Supremes were travelling to the UK in two days' time. When the instrumental track had been cut, Brian Holland phoned his brother, waking him up, and telling him they needed a set of lyrics for the very next day. Holland was actually already a little burned out that day -- he'd just been working on "Road Runner" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, which was intended as the follow-up to their big hit "Shotgun": [Excerpt: Junior Walker and the All-Stars, "(I'm a) Road Runner"] At least, Holland says that was what he was working on, though it came out five months later – but Motown often delayed releases by minor acts. "Road Runner" was not normal Holland-Dozier-Holland material, it had been difficult to write, and not only that they'd discovered that Walker couldn't play the saxophone part in the same keys that he could sing the song, so they'd had to varispeed the track in order to get both parts down. Holland had had a tiring day, and had just gone to sleep when the phone had rung. Brian Holland had a copy of the backing track couriered over to Eddie in the middle of the night, and Eddie stayed up all night writing the lyrics, eventually finishing them in the studio while he was teaching Diana Ross the song: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "I Hear a Symphony"] Because it had to be recorded in such a hurry, the Supremes were in London when the mixing was finalised -- as was Berry Gordy, who normally ran Motown's quality control meetings, the meetings in which the executives and producers all checked all the work that was going out to make sure it met the company's standards. Normally, if Gordy was out of town, Brian Holland would take over the meeting, but a new Supremes single was important enough to Gordy that he made an international phone call to the meeting and listened to the record over the phone. Gordy insisted that the vocal was too high in the mix, but Brian Holland pushed back, and Gordy eventually agreed to let the record go out as it was, despite his reservations. He agreed that he had been wrong when the record went to number one. It wouldn't start another streak of number ones, but the next eight singles would all go top ten, and the group would have another six number ones, including a streak of four in late 1966 and early 1967. There were other records, as well -- Christmas singles (which don't tend to get counted as "real singles", because Christmas records got put on their own special charts), and promotional efforts, like "Things Are Changing For The Better". That was a song that Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys had originally written for the Ronettes, under the title "Don't Hurt My Little Sister", but while Spector had cut a backing track, the song hadn't been considered worth the Ronettes adding their vocals, and the Beach Boys had cut their own version as an album track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Hurt My Little Sister"] But a year later, the Advertising Council wanted a public information song, to promote the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark acts that between them meant that for the first time discrimination against Black people wasn't legal. They turned to Spector to come up with something, and Spector, not wanting to waste a hit on them, came up with some new lyrics for the unused backing track, using the various slogans the Advertising Council wanted. Spector got his assistant Jerry Riopelle to finish the track off, and three versions were cut with different vocals over the same backing track. Riopelle produced a version with the Blossoms on vocals, another version was performed by the white pop group Jay and the Americans, and finally Motown put out a version with the Supremes singing over Spector's track. It's not the greatest track ever recorded or anything, but it is the only collaboration between the three biggest American hit-makers of the early sixties -- the Beach Boys, Spector, and the Supremes -- even if they didn't actually work together on it, and so "Things Are Changing For The Better" is interesting as a capsule of American pop music in 1965: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Things Are Changing For The Better"] But Gordy had plans for the Supremes that involved them moving away from being merely pop stars, and the title of “I Hear a Symphony” worked well for Gordy's plans. Like Sam Cooke before them, he wanted them to move into the more lucrative middle-class white market, and like Sam Cooke that meant playing the Copacabana. We talked a little about the Copacabana -- or the Copa as it was universally known -- in the episode on "A Change is Gonna Come", but it's hard to get across now what an important venue it was. It was a mob-controlled nightclub in New York, and while it was only a nightclub, not a huge-capacity venue, headlining there was considered a sign that an act had made it and become part of the elite. If you could headline at the Copacabana in the early sixties, you were no longer a transitory pop act who might be gone tomorrow, you were up there with Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis Jr and Martin and Lewis. Of course, that whole showbusiness world has largely gone now, and the entertainment industry was going through massive changes in the early sixties that would soon make whether an act had headlined at the Copa as irrelevant to their future prospects as where they had gone to school, but nobody at the time knew that the changes that were happening -- thanks in large part to labels like Motown -- were going to be lasting ones, rather than just fads. So Gordy decided that his flagship group were going to headline at the Copa -- even though he had to agree to a deal which meant that for their initial three-week residency the group members only made sixty dollars a show each before expenses. And they were going to do a "classy" show. Yes, they would include a few of the hits, but most of the songs would be things like "Somewhere" from West Side Story, the Barbra Streisand song "People" -- which would be Florence's one lead vocal in the show -- the Guy Lombardo song "Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think", and of all things "Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] The rest of the repertoire was show tunes, a gender-swapped version of "The Girl From Ipanema" retitled "The Boy From Ipanema", a parody of Roger Miller's "King of the Road" titled "Queen of the House", and a medley of Sam Cooke's hits. Other than the Cooke material and the brief run-throughs of their own number ones, the setlist was tailored entirely for the Copa's clientele, which barely overlapped at all with the Motown audience. The Copa residency was a triumph, and led to the Supremes making regular appearances at the venue for seven years, but it came at a great cost to the group members. Ross was so stressed she lost a stone of her already low weight, the first sign of the anorexia which she would deal with for many years to come. Meanwhile, Florence had to miss a chunk of the rehearsals as she became seriously ill with the flu, though she got herself well enough to make the opening night. And while it was what Berry Gordy had been working towards for years, it couldn't have come at a worse time for him personally -- his elder sister Loucye died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage shortly before the residency, and her funeral was actually the morning of the opening night. The opening night went exactly as Gordy had planned, except for one ad-lib -- during the song "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You", after Ross sang the line “But gold won't bring you happiness,” Florence interjected a joking line -- "Now wait a minute, honey. I don't know about all that." The audience loved her ad-lib -- Sammy Davis Jr., who was in the audience, yelled out "All right, girl! You tell it like it is!" -- and the line got added as a regular part of the performance: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You”] along with a rather less fun bit where Florence would mention "little old me", and Ross would snarkily respond "Little?" But even though it worked, Gordy was furious, partly just because he was understandably in a bad mood after his sister's funeral, partly because it was a deviation from the carefully-scripted performance, and partly because it was a moment in the spotlight for someone other than Diana Ross. As retaliation, a couple of days later he had Harvey Fuqua tell the group that they were dropping "People" -- Florence's only lead vocal -- from the set because there were too many show tunes. Then, a week or so later, "People" was added back to the set, but with Ross singing lead. (Mary Wilson had also asked to have her own lead vocal in the set, but Gordy had just looked at her sadly and said "Mary, you know you can't sing".) Florence was devastated. She was already drinking too much, but that escalated after the Copa engagement. Even though the group had never been as close as many groups are, they had all genuinely attempted to create a bond with each other, even all moving on to the same street. But now, that physical closeness just became an opportunity for the women to note the comings and goings at each other's houses and pass snarky comment on it. Ballard was fast becoming considered a liability by the powers that be at Motown, and even the existence of the Supremes was starting to be seen as something that was merely a hindrance for Diana Ross' career, rather than them being seen for what they were -- a massively successful group, not just a lead singer and her backing vocalists. Florence wasn't very long for the group, and when we next look at them, we'll no longer be looking at the Supremes, but at Diana Ross and the Supremes...

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This is our Everest, Part 50: So It Goes, 1976

Twohundredpercent

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2021 62:35

Get off your arse, because This Is Our Everest returns once again with your heroes watching So It Goes, the Granada TV music magazine show from August 1976. It's a notable programme too, as this was the national television debut of The Sex Pistols, a group of Dickensian herberts who were about to create a very big (albeit brief) stink.But what of the rest of the show? Edward and Ian encounter a geography teacher who should be at home with his family burping out some prog rock, Peter Sutcliffe playing upright bass, Peter Cook phoning it in and Charles Shaar Murray being torn a new hole. It's very possibly the birth of Yoof TV, so now you know who to thank for *that*.Edward successfully establishes that there was at least one person in the UK not in attendance at The Sex Pistols' epochal gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4th June 1976, Ian uncovers a potential conspiracy involving Glen Matlock and a microphone stand and we look into the possibility of a TV show about the Mayor of Aberystwyth that involves full-frontal nudity. Business as usual, then. If you'd like to watch what all the fuss was about both then and now, you can find it here.There's a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% podcast. You can do so through Spotify, which you can find right here, whilst the podcast RSS feed is here and you can subscribe through Google Podcasts here and Itunes here. And you can subscribe through Patreon. We release extra episodes that go off-piste every week now, weeks and weeks (I'm not sure how many weeks) before they're released to the public. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

EP 73 The Last Vampyre - Sherlock Holmes

A Very British Horror

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2021 60:23

This episode we discuss The Last Vampyre which stars Jeremy Brett as ... uh... Professor Van Helsing, Edward Hardwicke as ... um... Baron Frankenstein and Roy Marsden as Dracula... sort of. So definitely horror. Definitely. It's Granada TV's Sherlock Holmes! Contact us on Facebook facebook.com/averybritishhorror Twitter: @verybrithorror Email: averybritishhorror@gmail.com

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How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

Bureau of Lost Culture

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2021 59:58

Cold War Spy meets The Fab Four in the USSR When Leslie Woodhead was asked by Granada TV to film a new young music group in a club in Liverpool in 1962, he had no idea what he was in for - and neither had the rest of the world. He was witnessing the birth of a phenomenon that was about to have a huge impact on both the culture and the counterculture. But by then he had already had another extraordinary experience - serving a stint as a cold war spy, learning Russian on a remote Scottish pig farm and spending time eavesdropping on Soviet pilots from West Berlin. These experiences continued to influence his life as a multi-award winning film maker, finally coalescing in his documentary ‘How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin'. In this episode, we trace the almost unbelievable transformational effect the Fab Four had on young Russians in the 60s and 70s - an effect that many believed was more significant than all the cold war western propaganda and the threat of nuclear attack combined, in helping to bring about perestroika and the fall of the Soviet empire. For more on Leslie and his work https://www.lesliewoodhead.com For more on Bureau of Lost Culture www.bureauoflostculture.com

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The Benji and Nick Show – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia

The Benji and Nick Show

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021 60:50

Benji, Nick and Shelley chat about The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia (1984 Granada TV starring Jeremy Brett). Emails sent to podcast@nicholasbriggs.com

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This is our Everest, Party Thirty-Seven - Lift-Off With Ayshea, 1974

Twohundredpercent

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2021 64:18

This week, Edward and Ian have been watching Lift Off With Ayshea, a Granada TV-produced ITV pop music programme from October 1974. These were eventful and turbulent times and shows like this one did a lot of the heavy lifting with regard to helping people forget this. After a quick style guide to pronouncing Ayshea's name and a surprise appearance by no fewer than five old friends of the podcast, your heroes get stuck into the big issues. These include the perils of high-waisted trousers, definitive proof that Alvin Stardust is on the side of good and a consideration of the scarcity of information about Paul Hogan in the 1980s.Ian tries hard not to get involved in any moral crusades but fails on at least two separate occasions, as well as finding time to try high heels. Meanwhile, Edward gets extremely deep into a conspiracy theory entirely of his own construction, one which ultimately ends in the necessity of making a public appeal for information from no lesser person than Les McKeown from the Bay City Rollers. Pretty standard, really. If you'd like to watch the programme, you can find it here, on YouTube.There’s a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% podcast. You can do so through Spotify, which you can find right here, whilst the podcast RSS feed is here and you can subscribe through Itunes here. And finally, a humble request. These podcasts take a lot of effort to write, record and release, and we would be extremely grateful for your financial support, in whatever way you can manage. We have our Redbubble shop, for the sartorially minded amongst you, and subscribe through joining us on Patreon. We even now have a Kofi button on the site, so do feel free to send us whatever you’re able to. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Eyes & Teeth - Season 5 - Edition 3 - Don Reid - "He's been there and Don it all"

Eyes And Teeth

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Mar 11, 2021 55:00

Don Reid was one of the first Comedians I worked with on board Cruise Ships and he made me very welcome. As a new act at sea, you really need to be looked out for and Don was one that just put my nerves at rest. He is great company and if you need a story or two about Comedians or Variety Acts Don is the man to see.One of the Original Comedians on Granada TV he proves to be one of the best with decades of history on stage in Summer Seasons, Pantomimes and countless years at sea.Don talks about writing for Ken Dodd and their last meeting together.Enjoy the stories of Don Reid.

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VISION ON SOUND - THE ESSAY 01 - WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

VISION ON SOUND

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2021 15:43

THE ESSAY is a new strand I'm hoping to introduce to VISION ON SOUND in the near future, in which I take a particular television-related topic or issue and attempt to approach it with a slightly more intense eye which I'm hoping still manages to be entertaining and not too dry. Obviously, I'm hoping that it will eventually become at least a semi-regular feature of the show, but I'm putting this one out to test the waters, and because I've been struggling to find a home for it in the episodes I'm currently working on. That said, with the way VISION ON SOUND devours content, don't be surprised if you hear it again in a future edition. The first essay takes the format of Granada TV's WHAT THE PAPERS SAY, and attempts to explain my own frustrations with British Press and how I perceive it in the modern era, and I hope that you enjoy it and, if you do - or don't - you'll let me know what you think. Equally, if you feel like you might like to suggest a topic (or even contribute an essay yourself) do let me know either via the Twitter account @VisionOnSound1 or via email at vos@fabradiointernational.com

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Episode 31 - Peter Hooton

Let Christy Take It

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2021 66:34

Derek and Kieran are joined by Peter Hooton. Born and raised in Liverpool, Peter Hooton co-founded, edited and wrote for the legendary Merseyside fanzine The End which featured football, music and fashion. John Peel listed it as one of his all-time favourite magazines of the 1980s. Peter then became a songwriter with his group The Farm who went on to have a No 1 album. A lifelong supporter and season ticket holder at Liverpool FC, he wrote for the LFC Matchday magazine during the 1990s and contributed to several books about the club. In 2009 he authored the top-selling Liverpool edition in the When Football Was Football book series. Peter has also scripted TV programmes, including a Granada TV documentary series about Liverpool's social/economic and political history, BBC Newsnight (Hillsborough) and BBC This Week (Politics). Peter has most recently been executive producer of a documentary about Liverpool's legendary manager Bill Shankly, Nature's Fire, which has received critical acclaim. Thanks to Hairy Baby for the support with the recording of this episode.

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Into Stillness - Total Immersion Sound Bath for Tranquil Stress Relief & Deep Relaxation

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2021 28:39

Deep rest and total relaxation is the goal. This tranquil sound bath can bring a sense of balance & wholeness to the body. Harmonic vibrations created by overtone-emitting instruments such as tuned percussion, singing bowls & gongs can stimulate the alpha and theta brain waves associated with a deep meditative and restful state that is highly conducive to healing. Create a sonic space for renewal, reflection and transformation with this powerful relaxation music, the perfect musical ambience for relaxing at home as well as for yoga, pilates, massage, healing therapies and bodywork. Hit play and de-stress! **** Silencio Music is an independent music production company with a focus on high quality ambient music for hypnosis, meditation & therapeutic relaxation. The music is based on clinical research & healing traditions and has been specially composed in collaboration with practitioners to produce an audio library of tracks specifically tailored to the needs of health professionals & therapists. Our licenses allow you to legitimately use our tracks and collections both as therapeutic background music and to create your own guided meditations, hypnosis audio products, videos, websites & mobile applications. Chris Mullett – Founder & Composer My music combines both acoustic & digital instruments with voice & ambient recordings to create flowing tracks which emanate peace, tranquility and harmony. I am constantly searching for new resonant sounds, rhythms & musical forms & have a deep interest in the power of music in both traditional and contemporary healing practices. I have over 20 years experience in composing music for meditation, hypnotherapy, relaxation and yoga & also compose music for film, theatre, dance and TV including work with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Young Vic, Channel 4 Films & Granada TV. https://calmsonic.com/ https://silenciomusic.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/SilencioMusic https://www.facebook.com/SilencioBlissfulMusic https://www.linkedin.com/in/silencio/

Eyes & Teeth - Season 4 - Edition 1) King Rat Duggie Brown - "Come Comedian With Me"

Eyes And Teeth

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Jan 17, 2021 56:04

Duggie Brown is one of the Original Comedians from Granada TV's hit show in the 1970's and he has been one of the busiest in the business even to this day.Duggie has always been an actor alongside his stand up work and has maintained a fantastic career in Variety & Theatre. His story is one of success and happiness and he doesn't mind sharing that Happiness around. In this Season I shall be talking to my Brother Water Rats to give my audience a feel of what The Grand Order Of Water rats bring. There are no strange handshakes, there are no big secrets but there are traditional rules within our Order that we all adhere to and continue spreading good will, laughter, music and artistry through the stage or media in some way as well as raising funds for Charity with our live events throughout each year.Listen to stories of each of my guests this season and their experience in the GOWR.

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2: The one with the Vitality Fairy, Julie Silver

Mojo Matters

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2020 30:06

Episode 6 25 years ago, when her son was a baby, he developed severe eczema & allergies. A year later her dad dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 57, Julie was then made redundant from a part time job at Granada TV and her marriage broke down. With very low energy, very high stress levels and some health issues, she transformed her life the help of nutrition, stress management and living a healthier lifestyle. Julie shares her story along with practical nutritional advice to help you with your mojo

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Lee Child

The Lock In with Jeremy Paxman

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2020 44:47

Paxo has a pint with Lee Child, creator of Jack Reacher. Topics include getting high, Granada TV, casting Jack Reacher, and the seductive power of vigilante justice. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

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T'as un trou dans ta mitaine

3d8plus4

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2020 79:22

Dans cet épisode survolté et énergétique de 3d8plus4, nous célébrons le retour à la vie de l'imprimante 3D Ender 3 Pro de Luis et la patch qui permet au char de Dan de rouler... Avec précaution, avant de foncer tête la première dans un défilé de nouvelles de jeux gratuits ou moins disponibles sur Steam ou le EPIC store. En restant dans le registre des jeux vidéo nous jasons de Final Fantasy XIV et de Shadowun: Dragonfall, puis du jeu de table Blackstone Fortress et de sa dernière expansion qui sort la semaine prochaine (Ascension). Au retour de la pause, nous parlons du livre 'Pure Invention - How Japan's Pop culture conquered the World', des séries 'Cobra Kai' et 'Lovecraft Country' puis de la minisérie 'Game, Set, Match' et du film Bill & Ted Face the Music... Avant de clôturer sur le charger 'NOCO Genius 10' une pièce de tech... légendaire...Intro:Dan s'est fait charcuter les gencives!La Jeep de Dan garde sa charge!L'imprimante 3d de Luis... Imprime!Nouvelles:3 jeux incontournables - des 'must have' : Ni No Kuni : Wrath of the White Witch (70% de rabais sur Steam) Revenant Kingdom (75% de rabais sur Steam) Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trilogy (50% de rabais sur Steam)2 jeux gratuits à ne pas manquer : Hitman 2016 (gratuit sur EPIC Store) Shadowrun Collection (gratuit sur EPIC store) Jeux Vidéo:Final Fantasy XIVShadowrun : Dragonfall SIDEQUEST Dan : Card Crawl (reporté)Jeux de Table:Blackstone Fortress : AscensionLivres:Pure Invention - How Japan's Pop culture conquered the World (Matt Alt)TV/Cinéma:Cobra Kai (2020, Netflix)Lovecraft Country 2020, (HBO/Crave)Game, Set, Match (1988, Granada TV, Youtube)Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020, AppleTV)Tech/IT:NOCO Genius 10Questions, commentaires: 3d8plus4@gmail.comSuivez-nous sur Twitter: @3d8plus4

Sarah Jane Morris special

C86 Show - Indie Pop

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2020 66:18

Sarah Jane Morris in conversation with David Eastaugh In 1982, Morris joined The Republic as lead singer they received enormous publicity from the music press including cover stories with NME and City Limits and a documentary for Granada TV. But the band was deemed too political for radio play, with the exception of Capital London. The Republic were signed to Charlie Gillett's Oval Records Ltd and released an EP entitled Three Songs From The Republic and two singles entitled "One Chance" and "My Spies". Success did not follow and the band split up in 1984. Morris then sang with The Happy End, a 21-piece brass band named after Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill's musical play. Playing a circuit that included Brighton's Zap Club and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Happy End explored protest music from Africa, Ireland and Latin America on a way that emulated Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. Morris explored her more theatrical side on Brecht/Eisler's There's Nothing Quite Like Money and Brecht/Weill's Pirate Jenny from The Threepenny Opera. The Happy End released two albums on the Cooking Vinyl label with Morris. Following a successful Edinburgh run in 1986, Morris then decamped to chart success with The Communards. Morris found fame initially with the Communards, who are best known for their hit "Don't Leave Me This Way". Morris featured prominently on many Communards tracks, her low and deep vocal range contrasting with Jimmy Somerville's falsetto. She has also recorded as a solo artist, releasing albums since 1989. These have enjoyed most popularity in Italy and Greece. Morris also contributed to the opera The Fall of the House of Usher (1991) by Peter Hammill and Judge Smith, singing the part of the chorus.[1] She also sang the part of Mère Ubu on the Pere Ubu album Long Live Père Ubu! (2009), which features songs from Bring Me The Head of Pere Ubu, David Thomas's theatrical adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. She recorded an album of John Martyn covers with guitarist Tony Rémy in 2019 entitled Sweet Little Mystery.

Ep4. Pip Jordan: Theatre, TV and film associate choreographer

In the 'House Seats'

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later May 29, 2020 28:47

After her training at Laine Theatre Arts, Pip went onto to have a very successful career in musicals such as Mack and Mabel, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Thoroughly Modern Millie before becoming assistant choreographer for Parade at Donmar Warehouse, Shrek UK and Ireland Tour and Beautiful - The Carole King Musical and is currently associate choreographer for the UK production of Frozen at the Theatre Royal Dury Lane. She was also a resident dancer for 6 yrs, Stars in their Eyes for Granada TV, appeared in numerous commercials and has worked with Kenneth Branagh on many of his stage and film productions.

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Conflict and Change: A Conversation with Rory Montgomery and Jonathan Powell

Trinity Long Room Hub

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2020 62:46

A joint initiative between Queen's University Belfast (QUB) and the Trinity Long Room Hub chaired by Jane Ohlmeyer, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub with a conversation facilitated by Richard English, Professor of Politics and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Internationalization and Engagement at QUB. Jonathan Powell and Rory Montgomery have had distinguished careers which have seen them act as key negotiators in conflict resolution from Northern Ireland to the Basque Country and Colombia. In this conversation-style discussion, Professor Richard English will probe both Rory and Jonathan on their experience of working in environments of conflict, covering topics such as the importance of dialogue and the legacies of the peace process in jurisdictions such as Northern Ireland. They will also discuss the relationship between Ireland, the UK and the EU, reflecting on the new context Brexit poses; and finally, how states respond to crisis, challenges and change such as that posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Rory Montgomery recently retired from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Prior to his retirement, he served as Second Secretary General with responsibility for EU issues, including Brexit. Before that he was EU adviser to Taoiseach Enda Kenny (2014-16), Ambassador to France (2013-14), Permanent Representative to the European Union (2009-13), and Political Director, dealing with foreign and security policy, (2005-9). He was a member of the Irish team which negotiated the Good Friday Agreement and the establishment of North/South institutions.He is currently a Public Policy Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub and an Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen's, and is also a consultant on EU issues. Jonathan Powell is CEO of Inter Mediate, the charity he founded in 2011 to work on conflict resolution around the world. Jonathan worked on the negotiations with ETA in the Basque country, on the negotiations in Colombia with the FARC and on the peace negotiations in Mozambique. Inter Mediate is working on 14 conflicts at the moment. Jonathan was Chief of Staff to Tony Blair from 1995 to 2007 and from 1997 to 2007 was also Chief British Negotiator on Northern Ireland. From 1978-79 he was a broadcast journalist with the BBC and Granada TV and from 1979 to 1994 a British Diplomat. He is the author of ‘Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland', ‘The New Machiavelli, How to Wield Power in the Modern World' and ‘Talking to Terrorists, How to End Armed Conflict'

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Oprah Winfrey and Sidney Bernstein

Think Like an Innovator

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2020 10:04

In this short broadcast we tell the stories of two great media moguls. Oprah Winfrey rose from a disadvantaged background to become one of the most influential people in the world. Sideny Bernstein founded Granada TV and in doing so displayed a remarkable piece of lateral thinking.

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All Is Bliss - Tranquil Sound Bath for Stress Relief & Deep Relaxation - Total Immersion

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2020 29:47

Rebalance your body with this blissful immersive sound bath - a tranquil retreat for your mind, body and soul. Create a sonic space for renewal, reflection and transformation with this powerful relaxation music, the perfect musical ambience for relaxing at home as well as for yoga, pilates, massage, healing therapies and bodywork. Hit play and de-stress! **** Silencio Music is an independent music production company with a focus on high quality ambient music for hypnosis, meditation & therapeutic relaxation. The music is based on clinical research & healing traditions and has been specially composed in collaboration with practitioners to produce an audio library of tracks specifically tailored to the needs of health professionals & therapists. Our licenses allow you to legitimately use our tracks and collections both as therapeutic background music and to create your own guided meditations, hypnosis audio products, videos, websites & mobile applications. Chris Mullett – Founder & Composer My music combines both acoustic & digital instruments with voice & ambient recordings to create flowing tracks which emanate peace, tranquility and harmony. I am constantly searching for new resonant sounds, rhythms & musical forms & have a deep interest in the power of music in both traditional and contemporary healing practices. I have over 20 years experience in composing music for meditation, hypnotherapy, relaxation and yoga & also compose music for film, theatre, dance and TV including work with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Young Vic, Channel 4 Films & Granada TV.

Unknown Performance of Love Me Do (1962)

BDJ's Cellar Full of Remixes

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 25, 2020 2:33

A three-minute sample from a tape auctioned in the '90s and purchased by the Beatles, featuring selections from various 1962 TV appearances has hit the Internet in December 2019. The samples consist of songs performed on October 17th, October 29th, and December 29th, 1962 — “Some Other Guy,” “Love Me Do,” A Taste of Honey,” and “Twist and Shout.” As this performance went out live on TV, it wasn't taped at all. As luck would have it, the audio of these Beatles' appearances on Granada TV's People and Places were recorded by Adrian Killen, a 16-year-old fan from Kirkdale, on a reel to reel deck wired to the TV Speaker. It was sold at an auction and purchased by Apple for around £2000 per track. Unfortunately, only brief samples are available, form the tape that was used to advertise the auction of the complete recordings. For instance, the Love Me Do sample lasts only 48 seconds. Here, as a world premiere, we present a complete version of this Love Me Do as played on 17 October 1962. Love Me Do is highly repetitive, consisting of just 3 chords, and the verse is repeated four times! This enables us to re-constitute the complete song from the sample, with only minor fudging of the intro and outro. The Love Me Do performance of 17 October is a revelation: not only was it the first Lennon-McCartney song to be played on television, it also differs from the version of Love Me Do on the single (and Please Please Me LP)! The difference is subtle, but it helps to resolve a mystery around the sacking of Pete Best as drummer. While the Beatles were rehearsing Love Me Do in Hamburg (with Pete Best on drums), Best made a suggestion for the arrangement: "The idea was to make the middle-eight different from the rest of the tune, and I said, 'OK, we put the skip beat in.'" The 'skip beat' was a fluctuation in tempo, an acceleration to lead into the vocal bridge and again later, before the instrumental middle-eight. It sounded good enough for John and Paul to accept. And when the Beatles went into the studio - with Pete Best - to record Love Me Do on June 6th, 1962, they included the skip beat (on Anthology 1). Later, the drumming of Pete Best was criticized, and the skip beat section was highlighted as being particularly poor. However, the critics do not consider that Lennon and McCartney accepted this skip beat in all performances until then. Next, when Ringo recorded the song with the Beatles (September 4th, 1962), they did not play the 'skip beat', but added handclaps during the solo section to liven things up a bit. The version with Andy White on drums (September 11th, 1962) similarly omitted the skip beat, and featured Ringo on tambourine instead. Therefore, it is amazing that Ringo played the skip beat on October 17th, just over a month after recording Love Me Do - without the skip beat. Apparently, Lennon, McCartney and Ringo didn't think it was such a bad idea (of Pete Best!) after all. This suggests that it was probably George Martin who objected to the skip beat, not Lennon or McCartney. In subsequent TV and radio performances (recordings available after January 1963), Ringo never played the skip beat again! I suppose they wanted to remain consistent with the version out on the record. So here we go, a truly unique live performance of Love Me Do!

Body Music#One - Blissful Music for Relaxation, Therapy & Bodywork

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Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2019 63:16

ALPHA ∆ SPIRIT - Powerful Binaural Relaxation Music with Alpha Beats

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2019 89:55

Music for Life: Uplifting healing ambience with alpha binaural beats – perfect background music for therapeutic relaxation, stress-relief, bodywork & yoga. Over 90 minutes of continuous blissful music.. Download: https://silenciomusic.co.uk/music-therapy-ambient-relaxation-music • Pro-Therapy+Digital-Media Licenses • 30/60 minute MP3 & WAV versions • No public performance licenses required • 30 Day money back guarantee Use the music legitimately in therapy sessions, health centres, schools, spas & salons and to enhance your audio products, downloads, videos, podcasts & apps without needing any other public performance licenses. **** BINAURAL BEATS When two sounds with slightly different frequencies are heard simultaneously the sounds combine to form a rhythmic pulse knowns as a binaural tone or binaural beat. The frequency of the pulse depends on the difference in frequencies of the two original sounds – if the first sound is 400Hz and the second is 380Hz the resulting binaural tone will have a frequency of 20Hz. Delta Waves 0.5 – 4 Hz Occur during periods of deep dreamless sleep and are linked to healing, recovery and pain relief. Alpha Waves 7 – 13 Hz are linked to creativity and the state of conscious relaxation and calmness. Beta Waves 13 – 40 Hz are known to be predominant during periods of concentration, activity, anxiety and arousal. Gamma Waves 40 – 70 Hz are associated with higher mental functioning including, perception, intelligent problem solving, self awareness, compassion as well as emotional responses such as happiness and fear. Theta Waves 4 – 7 Hz are associated with right-brain and subconscious insightful thinking, deep relaxation and mental imagery as well as meditation and REM sleep. Binaural tones can be used very effectively to entrain brainwave patterns by targeting frequencies usually within the Alpha, Theta and Delta ranges. They can be used as pure tones, or embedded within ambient music, natural sounds such as ocean waves, or within different kinds of noise. The entrainment process works best using headphones but can also be experienced using stereo speakers – make sure your ears are the same distance from each speaker! **** Silencio Music is an independent music production company with a focus on high quality ambient music for hypnosis, meditation & therapeutic relaxation. The music is based on clinical research & healing traditions and has been specially composed in collaboration with practitioners to produce an audio library of tracks specifically tailored to the needs of health professionals & therapists. Our licenses allow you to legitimately use our tracks and collections both as therapeutic background music and to create your own guided meditations, hypnosis audio products, videos, websites & mobile applications. Chris Mullett – Founder & Composer My music combines both acoustic & digital instruments with voice & ambient recordings to create flowing tracks which emanate peace, tranquility and harmony. I am constantly searching for new resonant sounds, rhythms & musical forms & have a deep interest in the power of music in both traditional and contemporary healing practices. I have over 20 years experience in composing music for meditation, hypnotherapy, relaxation and yoga & also compose music for film, theatre, dance and TV including work with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Young Vic, Channel 4 Films & Granada TV. https://silenciomusic.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/SilencioMusic https://www.facebook.com/SilencioBlissfulMusic https://www.linkedin.com/in/silencio/

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Candy Opera with Dave Wiggins

C86 Show - Indie Pop

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2018 59:41

When Candy Opera release 45 Revolutions Per Minute on February 23rd 2018, it will be a belated introduction to a very special band sired during Liverpool's 1980s golden age which has taken almost thirty years to happen. Lovingly unearthed and compiled by Firestation Records of Berlin and available on limited edition CD and deluxe vinyl, the result is a lost gem that points to a million what-might-have-beens. When Candy Opera first appeared on the kaleidoscopic early 1980s Liverpool music scene, by rights they should have changed the world. Here was a classic four-piece, after all, steeped in the symphonic pop of Love's Forever Changes and the Beach Boys' Surf's Up. Taking such influences as a template, alongside contemporaries such as Aztec Camera, The Pale Fountains and Prefab Sprout, Candy Opera were in the throes of crafting a 1980s song-book in their own image, and the band's 1983 Honeysuckle Rose demo has become something of a holy grail. By 1985 the band had played alongside the likes of The Pogues, The Go-Betweens and The Redskins, as well as appearing on Granada TV. Reviews in NME, Sounds and Jamming magazine followed. Forming on the tough Phythian Estate in Liverpool's Kensington district in 1982 and based around the song-writing of Paul Malone, Candy Opera offered up a nouveau classicist sensibility which had seen the band listen without prejudice to The Monkees and Karen Carpenter. With assorted Candy Opera line-ups augmented at various points by baroque flourishes of clarinet, flute or violin, such a sophisticated musical palette went way beyond notions of indie-band purism to create something grander, none of which remotely fitted in with the voguish scene-setters behind shoe-gaze, baggy and brit-pop. After a decade ploughing their own stubborn furrow in various guises, despite interest from EMI and Go! Discs, Candy Opera called it a day in 1993 with only a fistful of demos to their name.

Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train”

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2018

Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe’s music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe’s life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald, For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it’s really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it’s dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when I get to the nineties. But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar. To find out why, we’re going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall. We’ve talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond’s legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I’d talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that’s a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally — they had problems, but weren’t all bad. Far from it). One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. “From Spirituals to Swing”. It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative — one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It’s like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other. The fact is, most of the narrative about “primitive” music — a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes — is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn’t because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn’t afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult. But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music. In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man — Thomas Dorsey. (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we’ve mentioned a couple of times earlier). Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name “Georgia Tom” he’d collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song “It’s Tight Like That”, from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form — and it sold seven million copies. [excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”] That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made — you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who’s ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history. But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he’d been playing. It’s rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey. Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since. He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns — at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”. That’s a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this: [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”] That’s not “primitive” music. That’s not music that is unsophisticated. That’s not some form of folk art. That’s one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration. And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn’t need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn’t making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands. Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive. Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it’s probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that’s where it’s based, and that’s where most of its membership is. The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it’s the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it’s a Pentacostal church, because that’s something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe. Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I’m going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you’re a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I’ll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended. While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe — if they’re “born again” to use a term that’s a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism — to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be “baptised in the Holy Ghost”. This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call “water baptism” — though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether. This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), “All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them”. Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they’re going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you’re going to Heaven. You’re going to Heaven once you’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that’s an end of it. At least, it’s an end of it so long as you continue with what’s called “outward holiness”, and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit’s entered into you, you’re going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don’t do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all. This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it’s a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn’t just about fear and living right, it’s also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about. It’s no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches — at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there’s a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches. But while most of the performers we’ll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we’ll see a lot in the history of rock — the pull between the spiritual and the worldly. From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn’t generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of — because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage — to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her — broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to. Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness. She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway. In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen — at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated — only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a “jungle musician”. The name itself — the Cotton Club — was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface. So it’s not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she’d been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course — in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist — but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be “Holy Rollers”, mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it. Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement — and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money — and her role was simply to be one of many acts who’d come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records. Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” but given the newer title “Rock Me” by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey’s original, with one important exception — where he had written “singing”, Tharpe sang “swinging”. [excerpt of “Rock Me”] Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to “Rock Me”, and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single. When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and “That’s All”, backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe’s performance. [excerpt of “That’s All” from Carnegie Hall] The sound quality of these recordings isn’t great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance. Tharpe’s performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better. While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together — Mo Gale, Millinder’s manager, was also Chick Webb’s manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he’d seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder’s Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder’s band, said that it was Millinder’s idea, not Gale’s, to get Tharpe on board. Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she’d been performing earlier — her gospel repertoire — but with a big band backing her. She’d also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary — where before she’d had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad. Her remake of “Rock Me” with Millinder’s band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years: [excerpt of 1941 “Rock Me”] With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That’s just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn’t how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe. Soon after she joined Millinder’s band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York — regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X. The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after — allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn’t allow that — although as Malcolm X said, it wasn’t as if they were dragging the white women in there. However, Millinder’s band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course — she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like “Tall Skinny Papa”, which wasn’t particularly gospel-like [excerpt “Tall Skinny Papa”] And it’s not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn’t sing on that one. [excerpt “Big Fat Mama”] So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first. This was in the middle of the musicians’ union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day”, with Sam Price on piano. Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn’t playing in a normal jazz key. He didn’t like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe’s mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee. But nonetheless, “Strange Things Happening Every Day” marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe — and it’s yet another song often credited as “the first rock and roll record”. [Excerpt “Strange Things Happening Every Day”] Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days — and it’s entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church — but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe’s friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi — although of course we will never know for sure. Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe’s funeral in 1973, The two of them toured together — and Tharpe toured later on her own — in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed, because they were with a white man — if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus. And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn’t even make the connection to how necessary it was for her. While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe’s most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she’d first recorded in 1938, “This Train”, again featuring Sam Price on piano: [excerpt “This Train”] That’s a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you’ll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy. There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums — and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* — her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow. Even Tharpe’s half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband. Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There’s fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time — along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with “Didn’t It Rain” [Didn’t It Rain TV performance excerpt] By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she’d always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she’d had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn’t even realise. “This Train” was not written by Tharpe, exactly — it dates back to the 1920s — but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time: [Excerpt of “My Babe”] Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe’s UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who’d had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of “My Babe”. Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you’d think. Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you’ve ever liked rock guitar, you’ve got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout! 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Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train"